421–430 of 504 posts
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I assume you mean "any lvalue"? You can't take the address of rvalues, can you?
Go doesn't define "lvalues," in the spec, but it does define "addressability." My comment would be more accurate if I had said "Go lets you take the address of any value in memory." (stack or heap)
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Go doesn't define "lvalues," in the spec, but it does define "addressability." My comment would be more accurate if I had said "Go lets you take the address of any value in memory." (stack or heap)
I don't think Go lets you take stack addresses. If you try to do that, it will copy the data structure onto the heap.
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Such ignorance. Willful? You seem new around here, and you are not using your real name. If only we were on Google+ :-/. The long stagnation from ES3 (1999) to ES5 (2009) had everything to do with Microsoft abusing its browser-tying OS monopoly to stagnate the web by disbanding the IE team after IE6. This was prosecuted in U.S. v. Microsoft. How old are you, to never learn or else to forget this? When I brought Mozil…
You accuse me of trollish behavior, yet resort to personal slights, asking how old I am? Irony. Did I ever question your age or intent? I am fully aware of Microsoft's behavior, but that still doesn't address the fundamental issue that language evolution within spec committees is painfully slow and the competing interests waterdown proposals. It happened to C++ and to Java too. It happens in our government as well, w…
I despair of your reading comprehension, though, when it comes to what I have written about the leaked memo's Dash strategy. I never wrote that JS can be as fast at Dart-to-JS code as a native Dart VM could be. Not ever -- quite the reverse.
Now if we on TC39 had the benefit of Google's Dart expert input any time in the last year, we could have possibly worked harder on guards (optional type annotations), branding (aka trademarking, nominal types for use with guards), bignums, classes, or other proposals that have suffered in comparison to those that clearly made it into ES6. FYI, these were all strawman-status on http://wiki.ecmascript.org over the last year or so.
Some Googlers on TC39 did work on a few of these, in most cases too late for our agreed-upon ES6 proposal cut-off date. We did hear a dire warning from one Google rep in May 2010 that if two of these proposals were not promoted to Harmony status, JS "would be replaced!"
So your complaints about the ECMA standard not progressing fast enough come with ill grace from a google employee. Google has a lot of power and it has not discharged it responsibly, in my view. ES6 would be a better Dart-to-JS target language, including draft specs and prototypes in V8, if it had made a concerted effort.
Contrast this with Mark Miller (Google) and Tom Van Cutsem working in the open, and very effectively, on ES6 proxies, already prototyped in SpiderMonkey and V8. Or the module system designed by Dave Herman and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt in the open, which you overlooked.
Talk about self-fulfilling prophecy! In this case, you are not even predicting the future, you're misstating the past.
From whatever little I see, I am already hating it :-) This looks like Java for Javascript, if that makes any kind of sense. We are in the year 2011, PL design has progressed so much since 1990 that such an anachronism is unpardonable. I sincerely wish that companies like Google focus on hiring the right kind of person for designing programming languages. What is frustrating is that there are so many people who can d…
In CoffeeScript compilation is entirely local and highly modular.
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Can someone explain to me what's the point of having syntax like: `var foo = new Bar()`? Why can't a constructor just be a regular method that happens to return a new instance? What's with this new nonsense?
Nitpick: you can make a constructor look like a regular method that happens to return a new instance, but you cannot make it one. How would that constructor make the instance that it returns? I think the overhead of adding that 'new' is worth it. Without it: in var foo = Bar() , is Bar a type or a function? If you decide it should be colored like a type, your syntax colorer needs deeper information about the code, ma…
+ alloc // reserves memory and creates an instance
- init // initializes the instance
- initWithSomething: // can have multiple initsEarlier quoted context omitted.
No browser vendor will give a free lunch to a competitor, at high opportunity cost, by locking themselves into a brand-new and 2nd scripting engine. No one. Steve Jobs' ghost will haunt anyone who tries. It doesn't matter how "good" Dart is.
re: brand new: fine, wait until it isn't brand new re: lock in: I'd think Mozilla isn't really locked in as long as there is a cross-compiler. If you decide the the code bloat isn't worth the speed improvement (for the sites that run dart code), yank the VM and no harm done re: opportunity cost: well the code from Google can be dropped in, unless you really feel the need to rewrite your own version. re: "free lunch t…
WebKit is supporting Python bindings but that language is 3rd after Objective-C and Apple pays the big Obj-C costs.
My comment about Dart's merits was purely a businessman's evaluation, not NIH. Before you throw that accusation my way, consider Mozilla using Google WebM code, and lately implementing SPDY.
You expect other competing browsers to give Google a strategic free lunch, and to give up their share of influence in standards bodies? No way, not from us, or from Apple or Microsoft or Opera.
But it turns out Dart does not have obvious merit, such that I am moved to implement it (see SPDY for a counter-example). Dart is jejune, knee-jerk, and conservative in its design, from what I have now seen.
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"That's like saying C can't be faster than hand-coded assembly" Don't change the subject. The topic is not productivity as you seem to imply here. Also, JS engines are not hard to track super-scalar CPUs. A compiler can target one JS VM (e.g., V8) but then you're locked in. All the current JS VMs have peculiar optimization faults, some worse than others, many completely disjoint across VMs. No one has a compiler targ…
What percentage of apps do you think bignum performance will matter? Even in cases where it might matter (cryptography), you would be better suited using GPGPU code, or adding cryptographic APIs to the browser itself rather than insisting it be done in JS. Indeed, you could always fallback to that for browsers with poor bignum performance. GWT has supported Java's BigInteger/BigDecember, and it's never been an issue.…
If, as the leaked memo asserted, JS's lack of more than one number type is "unfixable", and we now see that Dart's fix is to add bignum as well as double, then bignum must matter. Else why do bignums in Dart?
This ignores the live bignum strawman on the ecmascript.org wiki, which Googlers on tc39 failed to champion.
If your argument is that bignum literal and operator syntax, not bignum performance, are what matters, I am with you -- but then why did no Google rep on tc39 work to advance the bignum strawman?
You can't have it both ways. It looks like some Google heavy hitters focused only on Dart as if it has a native VM, and not on Dart as a source language for JS, which implies certain obvious extensions to the ES standard.
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In my opinion, Go is an anomaly in a company dominated by Java developers. I mean, this is a company that has gone so far as to write what is essentially a Java to Javascript compiler. http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ I wouldn't be surprised if "performance" of the language meant "able to get our vast fleets of mediocre Java developers to write web apps faster" rather than "able to execute faster".
"I wouldn't be surprised if "performance" of the language meant "able to get our vast fleets of mediocre Java developers to write web apps faster" rather than "able to execute faster"." Yes, because Google is notorious for hiring "mediocre developers". Or are Java developers especially considered "mediocre" by definition? Or does dabbling in Ruby/Python/Lisp/Closure/Scala/Haskell make you "non mediocre" by definition…
I agree that there are some amazing Java devs out there.
Most Java devs are not amazing (and heck most devs aren't amazing). But Java devs are not amazing with a frequency and depth that both boggles the mind and is entirely expected as that's the point of the language -- accommodate mediocre developers in a large shop producing boring enterprise code.
If you look where it's publicly known that Google uses Java, it's pretty much in Ads. The most boring, enterprisy kind of dev job Google has, but it's the money maker so it has to work despite having unmotivated "I'm just here for the paycheck" developers hacking on it.
Yeah, I know, it was used on the backend of Wave, and via GWT for the Wave web client (which was dog slow btw, I loved Wave, but have yet to encounter a web app as slow). And look where that got us.
As an aside, here's an interesting little writeup about why GWT is bad (with bonus example by pg of all people)
http://ryandoherty.net/2007/04/29/why-google-web-toolkit-rot...
And, at least publicly that's about it. If a dev can't be bothered to just learn the syntax of another language in a couple of weeks in order to properly support their target platform, they are a mediocre developer almost by definition.
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When you're trying to change things, it's best to appeal to the early adopters and to do give them a real reason to switch. Making it look the same and appealing to the same "user base" won't work, because then they might find little reason to switch in the first place.
Staying with the norm worked out quite well for both Java and C#.
It's early days, and they haven't presented yet, but son I am disappoint.
I guess I'm not super-excited about it because I was expecting something revolutionary, but when you think about where they're coming from, it was to be expected. Lars and co are simply building on V8, so it makes more sense that Dart is some sort of improvement on javascript, rather than something entirely new.