Hi,

some might find this interesting.

A presentation about the ParaSail, system programming language based on Ada.

https://air.mozilla.org/region-based-storage-management-parasailing-without-a-garbage-chute/

It makes use of regions and compiler inference to automatically
manage memory, instead of using a GC.

Maybe some ideas for D types with custom allocators.

--
Paulo

Paulo Pinto:

> A presentation about the ParaSail, system programming language based on Ada.
>
> https://air.mozilla.org/region-based-storage-management-parasailing-without-a-garbage-chute/

Seems interesting, almost 90 minutes of talk. Do you know if there is a link to download the slides?


> It makes use of regions and compiler inference to automatically
> manage memory, instead of using a GC.

It sounds similar to what Rust does.


> Maybe some ideas for D types with custom allocators.

To manage the regions Rust uses specific features of the type system (and a specific built-in syntax to parametrize types according to their region with a T/region syntax).

Bye,
bearophile

Am 10.02.2013 15:16, schrieb bearophile:
> Paulo Pinto:
>
>> A presentation about the ParaSail, system programming language based
>> on Ada.
>>
>> https://air.mozilla.org/region-based-storage-management-parasailing-without-a-garbage-chute/
>>
>
> Seems interesting, almost 90 minutes of talk. Do you know if there is a
> link to download the slides?

Did not found any, besides the official blog.

http://parasail-programming-language.blogspot.de/

>
>
>> It makes use of regions and compiler inference to automatically
>> manage memory, instead of using a GC.
>
> It sounds similar to what Rust does.
>

Yes, the Rust developers are part of the audience.

Paulo Pinto:

> https://air.mozilla.org/region-based-storage-management-parasailing-without-a-garbage-chute/

Half of the talk is about Parasail language in general. Despite
the parallelism it looks like a simple enough language to learn
(maybe even simpler than Go).


At 9.08-9.56 he says "you have to specify the names of the
objects you are referencing from the outer scope."
It's like my idea of @outer():
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5007


At 40.27-40.43 he shows a very easy to understand graph of how
Rust manages its memory. When you have many CPU cores I think
that organization scales better than D memory management.

Bye,
bearophile

On Sunday, 10 February 2013 at 09:50:30 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Hi,
>
> some might find this interesting.
>
> A presentation about the ParaSail, system programming language based on Ada. ...

ParaSail is not really based on Ada, but it does try to incorporate good ideas from a number of languages, including Ada, ML/OCaml, Modula/Oberon, D ;-), etc.

For more information on the design and implementation of ParaSail see:

  http://parasail-programming-language.blogspot.com

-Tuck

P.S. the e-mail address is a fake.  If you want to reach me best is to post a question to the blog or the ParaSail Google Group:

   http://groups.google.com/group/parasail-programming-language

-T

Tucker Taft:

> ParaSail is not really based on Ada, but it does try to incorporate good ideas from a number of languages, including Ada, ML/OCaml, Modula/Oberon, D ;-), etc.

Wow Tucker Taft himself :-) You seem quite expert, despite the very friendly attitude shown in this talk.

As seen in a talk slide ParaSail throws away *lot* of stuff, to fulfill its main purpose of allowing lot of parallelism in an imperative language.

While D is more a "kitchen sink" language, that takes lot of stuff from C, C++, Java and more. So D seems much more complex than ParaSail. On the other hand most things present in D are useful/handy.


I don't know how well D will work on CPUs with 50-200 cores. The current simple GC has problems even on a single core, so on 100 cores I think it will become a mess. The Rust memory model seems quite more fit for that:
http://i.imgur.com/16rxWXY.png


The ParaSail idea of the need to specify what variables to use from outer scope is an idea that I like since few years, and I'd like a form of it in D (with an optional @outer() or something similar) because in the years I have seen many problems caused by using by mistake identifiers from outer scopes.

Bye,
bearophile

Am 18.02.2013 01:22, schrieb Tucker Taft:
> On Sunday, 10 February 2013 at 09:50:30 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> some might find this interesting.
>>
>> A presentation about the ParaSail, system programming language based
>> on Ada. ...
>
> ParaSail is not really based on Ada, but it does try to incorporate good
> ideas from a number of languages, including Ada, ML/OCaml,
> Modula/Oberon, D ;-), etc.
>

Thanks for clearing that up. I got that impression due to the Ada like syntax and being developed by Ada Core.

Only afterwards I discovered that you were already developing ParaSail before joining Ada Core.

It looks nice though.

--
Paulo