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ESR Sees Three Viable Alternatives To C (ibiblio.org)
An anonymous reader writes:
After 35 years of programming in C, Eric S. Raymond believes that we're finally seeing viable alternatives to the language. "We went thirty years -- most of my time in the field -- without any plausible C successor, nor any real vision of what a post-C technology platform for systems programming might look like. Now we have two such visions...and there is another."
"I have a friend working on a language he calls 'Cx' which is C with minimal changes for type safety; the goal of his project is explicitly to produce a code lifter that, with minimal human assistance, can pull up legacy C codebases. I won't name him so he doesn't get stuck in a situation where he might be overpromising, but the approach looks sound to me and I'm trying to get him more funding. So, now I can see three plausible paths out of C. Two years ago I couldn't see any. I repeat: this is huge... Go, or Rust, or Cx -- any way you slice it, C's hold is slipping."
Raymond's essay also includes a fascinating look back at the history of programming languages after 1982, when the major complied languages (FORTRAN, Pascal, and COBOL) "were either confined to legacy code, retreated to single-platform fortresses, or simply ran on inertia under increasing pressure from C around the edges of their domains.
"Then it stayed that way for nearly thirty years."
"I have a friend working on a language he calls 'Cx' which is C with minimal changes for type safety; the goal of his project is explicitly to produce a code lifter that, with minimal human assistance, can pull up legacy C codebases. I won't name him so he doesn't get stuck in a situation where he might be overpromising, but the approach looks sound to me and I'm trying to get him more funding. So, now I can see three plausible paths out of C. Two years ago I couldn't see any. I repeat: this is huge... Go, or Rust, or Cx -- any way you slice it, C's hold is slipping."
Raymond's essay also includes a fascinating look back at the history of programming languages after 1982, when the major complied languages (FORTRAN, Pascal, and COBOL) "were either confined to legacy code, retreated to single-platform fortresses, or simply ran on inertia under increasing pressure from C around the edges of their domains.
"Then it stayed that way for nearly thirty years."
This is totally wrong. The runtime and compiler models for Rust are pretty much exactly the same as for C. People are running Rust code on 8-bit microcontrollers: https://github.com/avr-rust/ar.... You can write kernels and device drivers in Rust and people are.
This is all less true about Go because it needs a garbage collector.
They're only equivalent in 12-tone equal temperament, or on a keyboard instrument that only has 12 notes per octave (equally spaced or not). Western music also maps unambiguously (though not always pleasantly) onto 19- and 31-tone equal temperament, where a double sharp is most definitely not the same as the next whole tone up because a "whole tone" might be 5 minimum increments (this is the case in 31-ET, the better-sounding of the two in most cases), and a semitone just two. This would leave Cx a full 1/31 of an octave flatter than D natural. (And this is why we even have double sharps and double flats, to keep the theory clean because we haven't always mapped everything onto 12-ET and may not always do so in the future.)
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.