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A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

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Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#101

Post by mcdougle »

catnaroek wrote: post #92
moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

> But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. Not true. And, even if it were, how is that in any way a downside from Microsoft's point of view? As a Linux user myself, the main reason why I switched from Windows is that all the exciting advances in programming languages are happening in * nix-land, mainly Haskell and Rust. If there were some super-duper-awesome language for which Windows were the first-cla…

I dunno. I agree with you that "only works in Windows" is not a downside for MS, but.... I'd argue that the best way for them to make Windows a good programming platform would be to make it better and easier to program in the other languages already there -- C++, Java, PHP, Rails all work on Windows, just... not as easily as on *nix. Although I guess a new, good language wouldn't hurt.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#102

Post by erickt »

ksk wrote: post #88
ehsanu1 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust aims to match C++ in performance.

Someone should add that to their FAQ then. https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-project-FAQ This is what they state their goal is. (no mention of performance) >To design and implement a safe, concurrent, practical, static systems language. vs (linked article) >high productivity (ease of use, intuitive, high level) AND guaranteed (type)safety AND high execution performance.

You're right, we should mention it. Thanks for catching this. I filed a bug ticket to add some language about our performance goals:

https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/11174

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#103

Post by sergiotapia »

I just hope it's not so heavily tied to an IDE. One of the things I really enjoy about using Go and Ruby is that I can use whatever the heck I want to write code. C# was my first language learning and it took a while to shake off the notion that "everything must be done with an IDE".

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#104

Post by sillysaurus2 »

jbeja wrote: post #94
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). Speaking of Mono, does anyone know of a good resource for C#/.NET devs to learn how to port their Windows apps to Linux/Mac relatively easily? I did a writeup a month ago about my first impressions of Mono: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6744622 In short, there don't seem to be very many "Here's how…

If python is the language that you are gonna use, you would try Kivy cross-platform framework to make GUI for desktop and mobile.

I just tried Kivy. Thanks for telling me about it! Kivy is pretty awesome: very easy to use, and it Just Works on all platforms, even mobile. It's also painless to deploy Kivy apps to users, which is great.

It's hardware accelerated, so I can write my own custom GLSL shaders for the UI, which is pretty cool. I bet I could even implement a Mario-style game using Kivy. The main application window is just a GL context, and all the UI widget rendering is done via GL.

Unfortunately the Kivy UI seems to be riddled with bugs, and the UI widgets themselves are very alien. For example, the Kivy file browser widget seems to be incomplete (it lacks basic features) and confusing (it behaves nothing like a native file selector). So Kivy is probably too jarring of an experience for users... if I use Kivy in its current form, all my users would balk at the unintuitive UI, since Kivy's widgets don't look or feel anything like native platform widgets. And since users would also be fighting Kivy's UI bugs, I predict every user would immediately ragequit my app. (E.g. drag-selecting text within multiline textboxes seems to be broken, etc.)

That said, Kivy is very close to being an effective way to effortlessly write crossplatform GUI apps. The main reason to use Kivy is because it's so easy to write useful apps with it. I wrote one in about 15 minutes from start to finish. The API is a pleasure to use, and the data binding design is especially brilliant.

Kivy seems pretty fantastic for writing internal tools. Data visualization via Python is now a cinch thanks to Kivy. For example, it'd be easy to write an app that shows the current status of all your server instances. And of course at that point it'd be easy to extend your app's functionality with features like "right click on a server instance to spawn an SSH session into it". Stuff like that is a breeze thanks to Kivy.

Time to try out everyone else's suggestions. Up next: Clojure + Seesaw. (This thread has been incredibly helpful... So many interesting ideas. Thanks, everyone!)

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#105

Post by jeremiep »

matjazmuhic wrote: post #26
greatsuccess wrote: post #7

C++ does not perform, is not a managed language, and has nothing to offer. What could he possibly be talking about? I read this as MS once again getting it completely wrong. Seriously C++ solving managed languages performance and memory problems? Physician, HEAL THY SELF.

Computer games which are impacted by performance the most are written in what language?

The entire logic of most games is written in slow-ass languages like UnrealScript or LUA.

The runtimes of the games are often code monstrosities wasting performance here and there.

Performance is way over-rated.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#106

Post by nkohari »

Kiro wrote: post #78
moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

> (yeah, I know about Mono) Mono solves everything you complain about and that's the only mention it gets?

I don't know about desktop or mobile, but my experience with Mono for web applications has been pretty awful in comparison to Microsoft's implementation. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Mono team, but it's just not a good enough replacement.

It's actually caused me to stop writing C#, because I can't stand managing Windows systems, but there isn't really a good alternative.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#107

Post by barrkel »

shadowmint wrote: post #79
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). Speaking of Mono, does anyone know of a good resource for C#/.NET devs to learn how to port their Windows apps to Linux/Mac relatively easily? I did a writeup a month ago about my first impressions of Mono: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6744622 In short, there don't seem to be very many "Here's how…

Don't bother. No one is maintaining the cross platform GTK bindings (or .Net MVC framework) and basically no one cares about it. It's just getting more and more out of date. Look at an actively maintained solution like Xamarin or Unity; Xamarin lets you write your UI specific code for each platform; Unity lets you share UI across platforms but you won't get a 'native' look and feel on any. For both of these you won't…

FWIW, every pre-built assembly I've used on the CLR has "just worked" on Mono, no recompile necessary. But I don't have a lot of third party dependencies, mostly database drivers and a few bits and pieces.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#108

Post by dodyg »

bartwe wrote: post #87
hhariri wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You looked at Kotlin? As a C# developer I'm loving the language and it is x-platform. And that's despite my assumed bias, because I work at JetBrains.

I want to like it but the lack of value type structs and other GC avoidance features will keep its performance at java levels.

And for wide variety of server side applications, Java level performance is awesome

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#109

Post by dodyg »

trimbo wrote: post #97
hhariri wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You looked at Kotlin? As a C# developer I'm loving the language and it is x-platform. And that's despite my assumed bias, because I work at JetBrains.

Kotlin seems nice but when's Kotlin going to be "for real"? What I mean by that is, when will it go 1.0? When will we see a major project from Jetbrains implemented in it? Kotlin has been around for a couple of years now and Jetbrains still won't answer these questions as far as I can see[1]. [1] - http://devnet.jetbrains.com/message/5490337?tstart=0

You can start with the latest build. It is that good. There is no need to wait for the 1.0 version.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#110

Post by knocte »

makomk wrote: post #67
taude wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried working with Mono on my Mac. Meh. You loose a big part of the eco-system of third-party libraries because almost every program I've written uses a ton of third-party libraries. When ever you google soething on C#, you'll likely be getting windows specific results. Once you go down the pain of getting Mono to run on Linux...you may as well have just written your program in Java (or something else). While I…

Also, Mono's own ecosystem of additional libraries works better on Windows than on Linux. A while ago, I used a project that used an SQLite binding from the Mono project. They decided to discontinue development of this library in favour of a newer alternative, and it was then totally broken by subsequent Mono updates - but it continued to work fine on Windows with .Net. So any projects that still use this library are…

Quite funny that you try to generalize a statement from what appears to be just one single example (note: mono developer here and this is the first news I have about a fuckup like this).
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