Hacker News Reader

Comment by mamcx | Hacker News Reader

> The fact is that a viable, efficient, native and cross-platform GUI solution has failed to emerge

FreePascal have one. TCL, before.

The bigger problem, I think, is the language tie-in. For get the amazing Delphi/FreePascal UI you need to work with pascal.

To get TCL-UI, you need to work with TCL. This mean anybody that not want to code on that not even consider the option.

And how integrate your language of choice? You need to pass by C. C sucks. SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS. Is so bad that is the glue for native development.

In the other hand, Elector/React Native is tied-in with JS. If C sucks, JS sucks even more, BUT, you DO NOT HAVE A CHOICE. Is Js or the highway by proxy of the browser. So, even if you code in other language, you MUST (not everyone, but enough) soon or later to accept this fate.

And interface with JS is not as bad as with C.

View on HN

Delphi was a pretty fun thing: nice IDE and nice language (would prefer c-style, but still c++ is much less friendly), but terrible licensing made it niche (VS had completely free, including commercial use Express edition + non-comercial Pro licenses for students while Delphi was few bags of gold for personal license for whatever reason making it completely irrelevant on a global scope, freemium is the way to go with stuff like this, this is the exact reason why windows and office are so easy to crack) and you know, C sucks, c++ sucks, every language I ever heard of sucks but the ones that get laughed at the most: JS and PHP seems to suck much less in terms of usability but sure, lack of proper runtime/native compilers and GUI bindings make them niche (or used to, now unfortunately we have electron to make JS based GUI apps...)

>C sucks. SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS.

The more of my project I can write in C, the happier I am.

People sometimes irrationally like sucky things. C's memory model, type system, and feature set are sorely lacking by modern standards.

Given the feature set of Turbo Pascal 6.0 for MS-DOS in 1992, C was already sorely lacking back then.

> The bigger problem, I think, is the language tie-in.

Same issue with WxWidgets, which is otherwise great - AIUI, it was started as a C++98-ish library with support for lots of pre-standard compilers, and a lot of its deep weirdness is a direct consequence of that. OTOH, at least it has good bindings for other languages like wxPython.

looking at available bindings I guess c++ is still the least terrible choice this or JS one yeah, I know, there are some py lovers but I can't stand this thing

Of all the popular non-functional languages, I think C and D are the ones that sucks less, but D is not as popular, so that leaves us with C.

And this is the main problem. C, alike JS, ruin the chances of anything else to take over. Pascal is one that could have been much better to rely on. D is nice. Rust is too, but the chances of them to replace C is like typescript replacing JS.

In the other hand, I wish C get allowed to improve much more, and do python2/python3 split (with better handling of the situation, of course), to remove lingering issues, clean the syntax/API, and just add algebraic data types, match and Option<T>, and a good UTF-8 string (the only additions that I think are worthwhile without making C too different).

I envision a C-good that transpile to C-classic and slowly take over.

While not what you envision, I recommend looking at Go if you haven't.

I experience bliss while writing stuff in Go. It is not as fast as C, but it is getting closer with every release. Garbage collection in Go is so fast now that there may as well not be any pause at all.

It's worth a look, in my opinion.

I have look at Go. It impress me the first time, specially the CPS stuff. But now I'm working on Rust (apart of F#, python, Swift). Rust is nice, but too strict, and is very hard to be productive on it.

The lack of generics kills Go for me. I know it's an old rag and they'll never add them, but I just can't get over it. Maybe I should try Rust...

C doesn't have generics, either.

I was recommending Go to someone that wanted C plus a few things. For me, that's Go.

Why does the lack of generics come up all the time?

There's a bit of new syntax, but overall it does what you asked for: https://ooc-lang.org/ even compiled down to C

It didn't get very popular though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com