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Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

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Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

#71

Post by kbenson »

masklinn wrote: post #46
danieka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh. So I get it is a joke, I just don't get why it is a joke. I program daily in Go and everytime I read about buffer overflows and a dozen other preventable security holes I'm glad I'm programming in Go. But maybe this joke is only funny to those who enjoy programming in C? :)

Doesn't seem to be a joke, the "meeting" was week-long and lasted from the 22nd to the 27th: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2... It's just the ML recap mail which hit a rather poor timing.

The email was time stamped as being prior to April 1st UTC, so it's actually less an issue of the recap email being poorly times and more an issue of the post to HN being during a confusing time period.

Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

#72

Post by mahyarm »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #57
ASinclair wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a mere average user of computer languages, every time I play around with Go I start wondering how a language like this became so popular. You can pick it up in a weekend. A lower entry bar means more people will try it out. > It feels like it was invented in a universe where Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Smalltalk, Lisp and so many more languages and research in languages never happened. It was developed in a large en…

So was Erlang. The language, the runtime, and the standard library were all purpose-built together to solve a real world problem... to build fault-tolerant, distributed network applications. Which makes Go's rapid popularity as a language for solving the same problem even more peculiar. Especially since Go's surrounding tracing, debugging, and online code swapping facilities are so much worse. I'm sure some component…

Golang is simpler java, and that is it's target. It even has the same perf profile as java. Erlang does have a worse perf profile.

Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

#73

Post by Johnny_Brahms »

bluejekyll wrote: post #47
ue_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, you can probably also pick up Lisp in a weekend, experienced programmer or not. The syntax is also simpler.

But all those parentheses! I know it sounds like a lame reason to dislike a language, but I've always found staring at Lisp to be so much more difficult and distracting than C-style syntax.

Did you try coding in it for more than a week? I have found that using a properly indenting editor (Emacs, drracket) the parents just fade away.

And then you discover paredit and you start wishing every other language would let you treat your source code like that.

Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

#74

Post by twic »

eternalban wrote: post #43

Not sure why Ada is not taking off these days. It is mature and has all the safety and concurrency bells and whistles: http://www.adacore.com/uploads_gems/07_safe_secure_ada_2005_... https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Tasking http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs5204/sp99/Overheads/6UP/6UPCSPand...

I looked into Ada last year. Getting a toolchain working sanely on a Mac seemed quite a lot of work; it's not in Homebrew, the MacPorts version has some weird bootstrap process, and the various random versions available for download had a murky mix of license and implementation issues that i don't remember in detail.

So i read documentation instead. Ada mostly seems like a pretty sensible language. Its story on memory safety, though, seems to be "don't use dynamically allocated memory", or at least, if you do, you're on your own. It doesn't have anything like Rust's safety guarantees, or those that fall out of having a garbage collector.

If it was 2007, and Ada was a bit more easily available, I'd be agitating for it. But i think its shot at the open source big time has passed.

Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

#75

Post by steveklabnik »

riking wrote: post #63
steveklabnik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

go -> C calls have gotten way way cheaper in newer versions of Go. There's still overhead but it's not as bad as it used to be.

It's still absolutely terrible in terms of ergonomics. You're forced to perform manual memory management, etc. I've done it a few times and I absolutely don't recommend it.

I'm not making any value judgements here; just saying that the times have decreased significantly since the links that were posted.

Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

#77

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

chrismealy wrote: post #44
sfilargi wrote: post #20

As a mere average user of computer languages, every time I play around with Go I start wondering how a language like this became so popular. It feels like it was invented in a universe where Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Smalltalk, Lisp and so many more languages and research in languages never happened.

Go is designed for average programmers working in a huge organization. That's why its dullness is a virtue.

So, Java?

Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

#78

Post by im_down_w_otp »

mahyarm wrote: post #72
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was Erlang. The language, the runtime, and the standard library were all purpose-built together to solve a real world problem... to build fault-tolerant, distributed network applications. Which makes Go's rapid popularity as a language for solving the same problem even more peculiar. Especially since Go's surrounding tracing, debugging, and online code swapping facilities are so much worse. I'm sure some component…

Golang is simpler java, and that is it's target. It even has the same perf profile as java. Erlang does have a worse perf profile.

Yes Erlang does, strictly for execution throughput, but less so for concurrency handling. That is also a solveable problem. It just so happens to be a problem neither Ericsson nor ESL have been interested in solving.

Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

#79

Post by doktrin »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #57
ASinclair wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a mere average user of computer languages, every time I play around with Go I start wondering how a language like this became so popular. You can pick it up in a weekend. A lower entry bar means more people will try it out. > It feels like it was invented in a universe where Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Smalltalk, Lisp and so many more languages and research in languages never happened. It was developed in a large en…

So was Erlang. The language, the runtime, and the standard library were all purpose-built together to solve a real world problem... to build fault-tolerant, distributed network applications. Which makes Go's rapid popularity as a language for solving the same problem even more peculiar. Especially since Go's surrounding tracing, debugging, and online code swapping facilities are so much worse. I'm sure some component…

> So was Erlang. The language, the runtime, and the standard library were all purpose-built together to solve a real world problem... to build fault-tolerant, distributed network applications.

I'm probably outing myself as the lord regent of all impostor plebs, but Erlang is not IMO an approachable language regardless of its origins. Put differently : it looks completely nuts. I'm sure there's a method to the madness, but comparing it to Golang feels misguided (at least, from the perspective of awful programmers like myself)

Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam

#80

Post by Gaelan »

kbenson wrote: post #71
masklinn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem to be a joke, the "meeting" was week-long and lasted from the 22nd to the 27th: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2... It's just the ML recap mail which hit a rather poor timing.

The email was time stamped as being prior to April 1st UTC, so it's actually less an issue of the recap email being poorly times and more an issue of the post to HN being during a confusing time period.

I mean, the post could have been posted on April 1. We don't know that it was posted from a UTC area.
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