On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 22:02:48 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 19:16:10 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Every time I see such discussions, it reminds me when I started coding in the mid-80s and the heresy of using languages like Pascal and C dialects for microcomputers, instead of coding everything in Assembly or Forth
>
> If you insist on bringing up heresy...
>
> Motorola 680xx is pretty nice compared to x86, although the AMD64bit mode is better than it was. 680xx feels almost like C, just better ;9, I think only MIPS is close in programmer friendlieness.  Forth is nice too, very minimalistic and quite powerful for the simplistic implementation. I had a Forth64 module for my C64 to dabble with, a bit hard to create more than toy programs in Forth... Postscript is pretty close actually, and clean. But Forth is dense, so dense that you don't edit text files, you edit text screens...  But don't diss assembly, try to get more than 8 sprites and move sprites into the screen border without assembly, can't be done! High level languages, my ass, BASIC can't do that!
>
> But hey, I am not arguing in favour of Forth and C (although I would argue in favour of 680xx and MIPS). I am arguing in favour of smart compilers that allow you to go low level at the top of the call stack where it matters (inner loops) without having to resort to a different language. D is close to that, so it is a promising candidate.
>
> And... I actually think D is too lax in some areas. I don't think you should be allowed to call C/C++ without nailing down the pre/postconditions, basically describing what happens in terms of optimization constraints. I also want the programmer to be able to assert facts that the compiler fail to prove so that it can be used for optimization. Basically the ability to guide the optimizer so you don't have to resort to low level coding. I also think giving access to malloc is a bad idea. :-P
>
> And well, I am not new to GC, I have actually used Simula quite a bit in classes/teaching newbies. Simula incidentally has exactly the same Garbage Collector that D has AFAIK.  I remember we had a 1970s internal memo describing the garbage collector of Simula on the curriculum of the compiler course... So that is veeeery old news.
>
> Actually Simula kinda has the same kind of string type representation that D has too. And OO. And it has coroutines… While it doesn't have templates, it does actually have name parameters that has textual substitution semantics (in addition to ref and value). Now I also kinda like that it has ":-" for reference assignment and ":=" for value assignment, but I didn't like it back then.
>
> 45 years later D merge Simula semantics with C (and some more stuff). And that is an interesting thing, of course.
>
> But hey, no point in pretending that other people don't know what programming a GC high level language entails. If I want low latency, I go to C/C++ and hopefully D. If I want high level productivity I use whatever fits the bill… all GC languages. But I don't think D should be the first option in any non-speed area yet, so the GC is of limited use for now IMO. (In clusters you might want that though, speed+convenience but no need for low latency.)
>
> I think D could pick up more good stuff from Python, like the array closures that allows you to succinctly transform arrays. Makes large portions of Python's standard library pointless.
>
> What I really like about D is that the front end code appears to be quite readable. Take a look at clang and you will see the difference. So, I guess anyone with C++ knowledge has the opportunity to tune both syntax and semantics to their own liking and share it with others. That's pretty sweet (I'd like to try that one day).


Sorry if I hit any nerve, one never knows the experience of other people in the Internet.

It is just that in the enterprise world I have been part of projects that ported C and C++ based servers to JVM/.NET ones, always with comparable performance.

I do acknowledge that in game programming it might be different, however even AAA do play with GC systems nowadays, even if they have some issues to optimize their behavior.

For example, The Witcher 2 for the XBox 360.

http://www.makinggames.de/index.php/magazin/2155_porting_the_witcher_2_on_xbox_360

--
Paulo

On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 15:37:11 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 00:37:27 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>> Thanks. Not many votes though given all the downvotes. The comments manage to be even worse than on my first blog post.
>>
>> For some reason they all assume I don't know C++ even though I know it way better than D, not to mention that they nearly all miss the point altogether. Sigh.
>
> I wonder if someone who "knows" C++ is going to help you out and improve your code, much like others did with the other languages you used.

I know C++. It's not that I can't finish it, it's that I can't be
bothered to. That's the whole point of the post.

Atila

On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 11:43:05 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 15:37:11 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>> On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 00:37:27 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>>> Thanks. Not many votes though given all the downvotes. The comments manage to be even worse than on my first blog post.
>>>
>>> For some reason they all assume I don't know C++ even though I know it way better than D, not to mention that they nearly all miss the point altogether. Sigh.
>>
>> I wonder if someone who "knows" C++ is going to help you out and improve your code, much like others did with the other languages you used.
>
> I know C++. It's not that I can't finish it, it's that I can't be
> bothered to. That's the whole point of the post.
>
> Atila

I know, that doesn't mean someone can't come in and fix what they see wrong with it. C++ programmers have less reason to prove their language, but I think most are in denial that their language is diffacult and that it is a problem.

On 10.01.2014 17:21, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 11:43:05 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>> On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 15:37:11 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 00:37:27 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>>>> Thanks. Not many votes though given all the downvotes. The comments
>>>> manage to be even worse than on my first blog post.
>>>>
>>>> For some reason they all assume I don't know C++ even though I know
>>>> it way better than D, not to mention that they nearly all miss the
>>>> point altogether. Sigh.
>>>
>>> I wonder if someone who "knows" C++ is going to help you out and
>>> improve your code, much like others did with the other languages you
>>> used.
>>
>> I know C++. It's not that I can't finish it, it's that I can't be
>> bothered to. That's the whole point of the post.
>>
>> Atila
>
> I know, that doesn't mean someone can't come in and fix what they see
> wrong with it. C++ programmers have less reason to prove their language,
> but I think most are in denial that their language is diffacult and that
> it is a problem.


It does not help that C and C++ are currently the only portable languages across mainstream OS vendors.

Currently I am using C++ for my Android hobby development, not because I don't like Java, rather as it being the only common language across all mobile SDKs.

--
Paulo

>>> I wonder if someone who "knows" C++ is going to help you out and improve your code, much like others did with the other languages you used.
>>
>> I know C++. It's not that I can't finish it, it's that I can't be
>> bothered to. That's the whole point of the post.
>>
>> Atila
>
> I know, that doesn't mean someone can't come in and fix what they see wrong with it. C++ programmers have less reason to prove their language, but I think most are in denial that their language is diffacult and that it is a problem.

Ah right, I misunderstood your what you meant. The denial is real and I think the comments on reddit are proof of that. Who knows, maybe I'll do it myself.

The weirdest part of it for me is that my (broken but working) C++ implementation didn't even do badly performance-wise and people still complained.

Atila

> It does not help that C and C++ are currently the only portable languages across mainstream OS vendors.
>
> Currently I am using C++ for my Android hobby development, not because I don't like Java, rather as it being the only common language across all mobile SDKs.

I feel your pain. If I were to do a cross-platform app I'd probably do the same. At least the Android NDK has new gcc versions to use for C++11. I assume the same is true for iOS.

Atila

On 2014-01-10 19:52, Atila Neves wrote:

> I feel your pain. If I were to do a cross-platform app I'd probably do
> the same. At least the Android NDK has new gcc versions to use for
> C++11. I assume the same is true for iOS.

Yeah, iOS uses LLVM so that means C++11 as well.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg