Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> it means that Swift and Clojure are just as useless as Julia for numerous use cases where start-up times matter

Or that different languages require different approaches, and you can't translate 1:1 between technologies. My Mac starts up 27x slower than my C=64, but that doesn't make it useless for any task that requires turning it on.

> We're not talking about web frameworks, these are _general purpose_ programming languages

Are we? I've never written a line of Julia in my life but the impression that I get is that this isn't intended to be a general-purpose language:

> Of course, one might argue that Julia is not intended to be a general-purpose programming language, but a language for numerical computing.

> As has been pointed out elsewhere “Base APIs outside of the niche Julia targets often don’t make sense” and the general-purpose APIs are somewhat limited.

The Julia webpage has 6 tabs listing features, and 5 of them are about numerics. The 6th says "General Purpose", but it's mostly about FFI.

Julia is intended to be (and already is) a general purpose programming language. What it does not try to be is a language that tries to be good for every purpose. Python for example is a general purpose programming language but you wouldn't use it to write kernel modules, and likewise you wouldn't use C to write your simple website (even though you obviously can). A language that tries to be everything to everyone will either be too bloated and complex, or lack the included batteries for pretty much anything.

Even if we don't use technicalities, Julia is a very powerful language that allows people to extend it for purposes it was not built for. If it didn't support JSON, you could write a JSON type as integrated and fast as what the stdlib offers, it's metaprogramming/multiple dispatch paradigm allows for easily creating frameworks for many purposes and while numerical processing gets special attention the language will still outperform in terms of speed most dynamic languages in any domain.

And I do think short scripts are within Julia's main targets and are merely victims of the fact that the language is still too young and the battles the devs chose to fight within that limited time (and either AoT options or an interpreter that runs code while it's compiling could solve it really well for example, but both would require a lot of time and work which could be used for other features).

Are you sure?

https://micropython.org/

https://facil.io/

The poster said "(even though you obviously can)".

People will try all sorts of weird language experiments, so it's no surprise those libraries exist. But do you really expect a significant number of web developers to shift over to C, just because it's technically possible?

How do think many IoT devices serve their Admin UI?

I have no idea, and I don't really see how relevant this is to the original remark that you responded to.

They are written in C unless they are powerfull enough to hold something else, like Cisco does with Chicken Scheme on their routers.

https://www.micrium.com/rtos/tcpip/

Quoting the relevant quote "you wouldn't use C to write your simple website", except that is exacly what EE does when on device memory is measured in KB.

C++ would be safer, but the C89 culture reigns in such domains.

I did generalize above, but when I said "simple website" I really meant the usual simple website one the web, not firmware/embedded stuff. I kinda said that because I already wrote one in C including a basic CGI library, as well as a mid-sized one with Rails, and the difference clearly falls into "C doesn't try to be good at website creation, but you can obviously do it" (and in some occasions you just have to). I'd also add that Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in Assembly, but it's not a language that is particularly good for game dev in general (but still a completely general purpose programming language).

Micropython is not really python (which by definition is defined by PEP and CPython implementation), it's a language largely similar to python 3 since you can't just pick a python program or library and run on it at all times, but it's not really a relevant discussion (and it's nice to have multiple variants of a language you like that are good for multiple purposes, which solves the bloat problem as long as you use only one of them at a time).

Regardless, I hope Julia gets to the point that you can target as many places as some of those languages even if it's not nearly the best in each domain (like WASM, embedded, OS stuff, shared libraries).

Actually Assembly is how most 8 and 16 bit titles were written on, higher level languages were the Unity from 80-90's gamedev scene, Roller Coster Tycoon isn't alone.

I get your point, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com