Live data from Hacker News

C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

blog.lse.epita.fr

21–30 of 86 posts

Re: C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

#21
post #3

I think that languages that are a just thin shell on top of C (as opposed to languages that merely target C, e.g. Chicken Scheme) might have some potential. I'll call this coffeescriptification --still eagerly awaiting the first transpiled language that does nothing but remove C's braces and semicolons. If someone doesn't do it by next April Fools, I certainly will (I already have the name in mind: Glee (the italics…

[deleted]

Re: C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

#22
post #14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is dynamic memory allocation. It's actually one of the gripes I have with the "rust" language [1]. As a C coder I find it hard to take seriously a language that don't let me customize memory allocation easily. It's not impossible to do right though, C++ has "allocators" parameter templates to do exactly that (there's a default implementation that you can "override" with a custom class). [1] https://news.y…

Rust isn't finished yet. It's about to get 'regions', which come with custom allocators.

Hey, thanks for pointing that out (and thanks to kibwen for the link).

I've been trying to use (or rather, bend) rust for kernel development lately, and memory allocation was my biggest limitation so far (including stack allocation). Definitely looking forward to future improvement on the language, it looks very promising.

Re: C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

#23
post #3

I think that languages that are a just thin shell on top of C (as opposed to languages that merely target C, e.g. Chicken Scheme) might have some potential. I'll call this coffeescriptification --still eagerly awaiting the first transpiled language that does nothing but remove C's braces and semicolons. If someone doesn't do it by next April Fools, I certainly will (I already have the name in mind: Glee (the italics…

Funny how everyone wants to program in BASIC but doesn't want to admit it. Like the Python and Lua guys. Try FreeBASIC, it's a compiler.

Re: C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

#24
post #22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust isn't finished yet. It's about to get 'regions', which come with custom allocators.

Hey, thanks for pointing that out (and thanks to kibwen for the link). I've been trying to use (or rather, bend) rust for kernel development lately, and memory allocation was my biggest limitation so far (including stack allocation). Definitely looking forward to future improvement on the language, it looks very promising.

At least one of the developers wants to make Rust's runtime optional, to allow the runtime to itself be written in Rust. That would probably also serve your goals as well, so perhaps you'd be interested in helping out? :)

Quote:

"I'd like to see a 'runtime-less Rust' myself, because it'd be great if we could implement the Rust runtime in Rust. This might be useful for other things too, such as drivers or libraries to be embedded into other software. (The latter is obviously of interest to us at Mozilla.) Rust programs compiled in this mode would disable the task system, would be vulnerable to stack overflow (although we might be able to mitigate that with guard pages), and would require extra work to avoid leaks, but would be able to run without a runtime.

If anyone is interested in this project, I'd be happy to talk more about it -- we have a ton of stuff on our plate at the moment, so we aren't working on it right now, but I'd be thrilled if anyone was interested and could help."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3724577

Re: C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

#25
post #3

I think that languages that are a just thin shell on top of C (as opposed to languages that merely target C, e.g. Chicken Scheme) might have some potential. I'll call this coffeescriptification --still eagerly awaiting the first transpiled language that does nothing but remove C's braces and semicolons. If someone doesn't do it by next April Fools, I certainly will (I already have the name in mind: Glee (the italics…

Funny how everyone wants to program in BASIC but doesn't want to admit it. Like the Python and Lua guys. Try FreeBASIC, it's a compiler.

Not sure if irony, or really dumb comment.

Re: C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

#27
post #24
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks for pointing that out (and thanks to kibwen for the link). I've been trying to use (or rather, bend) rust for kernel development lately, and memory allocation was my biggest limitation so far (including stack allocation). Definitely looking forward to future improvement on the language, it looks very promising.

At least one of the developers wants to make Rust's runtime optional, to allow the runtime to itself be written in Rust. That would probably also serve your goals as well, so perhaps you'd be interested in helping out? :) Quote: "I'd like to see a 'runtime-less Rust' myself, because it'd be great if we could implement the Rust runtime in Rust. This might be useful for other things too, such as drivers or libraries to…

Thanks for the pointers, I'll look into that when I have more time :)

Re: C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

#29

I'm surprised of no mention of Bliss. Nice low-level DEC-10 language, later generalized a bit.

I remember reading about it in an article by Olin Shivers (the history of T, at http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html ).

After reading the wikipedia page about it, it doesn't seem to be available for any common platform.

How would it perform as a system programming language today (compared to C) ?

Re: C (Cbang) - A system oriented programming language

#30
post #12

I didn't checked the details, but I would love to see ten attempts every year, trying to solve the same problem. D and Go are not trying to provide us with a better C, because they don't share the concept of, a language that translates straightforward to assembler, but still is designed so that you can mount good abstractions with it. This is what you need for kernel programming, embedded systems, and a good deal of…

Native Oberon, Spin, Singularity, Home, Inferno are all operating systems written in GC enabled system programming languages.

D and Go are just following that thread.

Eventually all mainstream OS will have such type of languages and C will be legacy.

Microsoft is already slowly doing that by dropping support for C later than C90, and adding COM based API as the default Windows API. Now mainly for Metro, perhaps for the complete OS in later versions.

Apple as well, by adding reference counting and GC on their systems language, Objective-C.

C only got spread thanks to UNIX, and brought upon us the wrath of buffer overruns and dangling pointers security exploits.

We need better languages for doing systems programming.

Post reply on HN