Comment by geophile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geophile | Hacker News Reader

C/C++/Java. A programmer's version of Rock/Paper/Scissors.

Ignoring pre-history (BASIC, FORTRAN, PDP-11 assembler, Z80 assembler, Pascal), I started out in C, many years ago. I found myself using macros and libraries to provide useful combinations of state and functions. I was reinventing objects and found C++.

I was a very happy user of C++ for many years, starting very early on (cfront days). But I was burned by the complexity of the language, and the extremely subtle interaction of features. And I was tired of memory management. I was longing for Java, and then it appeared.

And I was happy. As I was learning the language, I was sure I missed something. Every object is in the heap? Really? There is really no way to have one object physically embedded within another? But everything else was so nice, I didn't care.

And now I'm writing a couple of system that would like to use many gigabytes of memory, containing millions of objects, some small, some large. The per-object overhead is killing me. GC tuning is a nightmare. I'm implementing suballocation schemes. I'm writing microbenchmarks to compare working with ordinary objects with objects serialized to byte arrays. And since C++ has become a hideous mess, far more complicated than the early version that burned me, I long for C again.

So I don't like any language right now.

> Ignoring pre-history (BASIC, FORTRAN, PDP-11 assembler, Z80 assembler, Pascal)

A side effect of C universalization, especially with open source, is that people forget all about that pre-history. Hacker culture now is mostly C/Unix with a dash of Lisp and Smalltalk heritage.

But from what I remember of microcomputer culture in the early 80s, hackers in the field were doing line-numbered Basic and Assembly language - if you had exotic tastes maybe Forth or something. If you were a Basic guy C was DANGEROUS (my programming teacher spoke of C the way Nancy Reagan spoke of crack cocaine) and if you were an assembly guy C was a slow hog.

And if you had access to a "real" computer, chances are it was running PL/I, COBOL or Fortran, not C.

The 1983 video game Tron had levels named after programming languages: "BASIC", "RPG", "COBOL", "FORTRAN", "SNOBOL", "PL1", "PASCAL", "ALGOL", "ASSEMBLY", "OS" and "JCL". C apparently did not merit mention; its complete dominance didn't come until some ways into the PC era.

SNOBOL. I loved SNOBOL. A completely bizarre, very powerful language. I took two wonderful compiler classes from R. B. K. Dewar, who worked on the Spitbol implementation. He was also involved with the SETL language, which really impressed me.

And setl influenced ABC, then Python

I was doing Turbo Pascal with some C only when requested to do so.

In the university UNIX forced me to move to C and later on C++. P2C was the only available Pascal compiler and a joke when compared with Turbo Pascal.

You may like Rust (disclaimer: I work on Rust). You get the choice of manual or automatic memory management, but no matter which you choose you don't sacrifice safety. The language is simpler than C++ but can be about as fast as idiomatic C++ and supports a bunch of higher-level features like closures and generics.

Rust is the one language that we as a mixed java/c++/perl/scala shop look at, and see a future in. Exactly because of its safety features. Keep up the good work!

I have very much the same pre/history, along with years of Perl. Then I discovered Go, and can't recommend it highly enough for exactly the reasons and specific case you state.

I attended a tutorial on Go, and while I liked much of what I heard, the tutorial was so poorly done that I did not leave with a good high-level understanding.

I also left with the impression that it is very early days with Go, in the sense that several parts of the language are evolving. (Or maybe I have this impression because the presenter loved diving into ratholes.)

If you have an hour go through http://tour.golang.org/#1. If you're like me and can't enjoy a new language without connecting it to the network and passing some JSON around, check out http://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/ and take a look at http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/#Marshal (if, also like me, you're picky about field name casing, pay attention to the little bit about `json:"myName"`)

I'll second this.

I went through the Tour of Go over a 3-day weekend when I didn't have many obligations and messed with a reasonable portion of the examples although none of the exercises (I think).

I really like it, although I don't think it replaces C's niche. But I think for the level where you'd like some of the structure and goodies of C++ or Java without the complexity it's pretty compelling.

The main thing I've been wishing were different about Go recently is that I wish it could generate some kind of C style dlls that could be interfaced with from other languages. It seems that Go wants to be the top-level, so I don't really know a way to use it for libraries or extensions for other languages.

So instead I'm considering C and Lua - C for the library with possibly a linked or embedded Lua to give some higher level niceties.

My hope is that I could create extensions that are callable from other languages using C APIs and then in the extension push some of the actual computations to Lua when it makes sense to use things like lists/dictionaries.

C# is an improvement in this regard - it at least gives you structs for when you need to store related data together without any greater overhead than you'd have in C.

Unfortunately unless you're on windows it's not that fast compared to Java.

I still hope that Microsoft will eventually make Bartok part of the standard .NET tooling and with that a proper native implementation for C#.

Actually they are doing something like that already with MDIL in WP8.

What kind of systems are you building that many gb of memory and millions of objects are a problem. I mean just the amount of memory and the number of objects itself isn't a problem for Java nowadays.

You mention GC tuning and object overhead so it sounds like there is some high-frequency object creation happening?

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