What's the pro of not having a stable ABI?
Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
111–120 of 200 posts
Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Swift can also 2-way operate with C++. Its coverage of the C++ language is incomplete but I suspect it might outpace Carbon.
I really struggle to imagine an organisation that shepherds a large and venerable C++ codebase migrating over to Swift. For all of C++'s faults, it is an extremely stable and vendor-independent language. The kind of organisation that's running on some C++ monolith from 1995 is not going to voluntarily let Apple become a massive business risk in return for marginally nicer DX. (Yes, Swift is OSS now, but Apple pays th…
Maybe not, but an Objective-C++ codebase might be a good candidate.
Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think this page describes "what" but not "why" of Carbon. Maybe the page was updated recently, but there is a "why" link near the top: https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/#why-build-carbon What I would like to see is more documentation on the "why not" that summarizes why other languages and proposals are not sufficient. For example, Safe C++ proposal[1] appears to satisfy all requirements, but I can't find any referenc…
The reason the Safe C++ proposal wasn't mentioned is that it came years later. =] I'll see if it makes sense for us to update that section a bit, this probably isn't the only thing that we should refresh a bit to reflect the last few years of developments. FWIW, the biggest challenge with Safe C++ is that WG21 rejected[1] that direction. And it was developed without building a governance model or way to evolve outsid…
To your footnote, this has been a constant refrain from WG21. One of the biggest achievements from yourself and many others was getting WG21 to explicitly reject P2137 the "Goals and priorities" paper rather than dithering and refusing to commit as happened for "Safe C++" and for the ABI paper.
I believe that getting WG21 to actually say "No" was very useful to have non-technical leadership people understand that C++ can't be the solution they need.
Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
#114in the end it's all bits in ram that a cpu has to execute. as long as the cpu ISA is build around common coding patterns found in c there seems no reason to use anything other than c. I get it that people do not like to code in a language that does not hold your hand. I myself prototype most of my code in c#. But in the end it has to fit inside the cpu ISA architecture.
Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
#115Wow the syntax looks terrible.
Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I blame the "we won't recompile anything ever" stance from the financial organisations for the breakdown. It means C++ cannot fix mistakes, even when they harm performance, under the general name of "abi stability". Thus there is an opening for a faster language. And still for a safer one. And for an easier one to use. So all C++ has going for it is inertia. It's moribund unless the committee reconsider their stance…
Will Carbon improve the ABI situation? Will Carbon be easier to interface with from other languages? A major role that C plays today is being the common protocol all languages speak[0]. C++ can't fill this role, and neither can Rust. There is a huge opportunity for some language to become the next common protocol, the common ABI, that all languages share in common. (Maybe Rust could do this, but they haven't stabiliz…
Well it's not really C that fills that role it's the C ABI which any language can use without an ounce of C. Rust can use the C ABI.
It would be nice if there was a somewhat higher level ABI that languages could use though. The C ABI is very low level and tedious.
Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
#117If you've seen this before, it's worth looking at the 2025 roadmap – it's long-term work, a full safety story hasn't been quite figured out (TBD end 2025), and 0.1 is TBD end 2026. About the pace of Rust, although without the active forum that Rust had in its early days. https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/docs/project/roadmap.html What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the…
> What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the C++ community, rather than the wider PLT community -- I worry that they won't benefit from the broader perspectives that'll help it avoid well-known warts elsewhere. FWIW, we're working hard whenever looking at an aspect of the language to look at other languages beyond C++ and learn any and everything we can from them. Lot…
Make sure you're checking out Hylo. I'm not sure that its ideas are right for Carbon, but if you're looking for a credible alternative to Rust's take on safety, I think it's one of the better ones.
Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
#118I think this page describes "what" but not "why" of Carbon. Carbon exists so that it's possible to migrate a large C++ code base, like Chrome, from C++ to something saner, incrementally. The most important attribute of Carbon is not the specifics of the syntax but the fact that it's designed to be used in a mixed C++ / Carbon code base and comes with tooling to convert as much of C++ as possible to Carbon. That's wha…
These are strong points and I think the methodology behind Carbon is the correct one. The elephant in the room is that once Google decide to drop Carbon my existing code base will be dependant on a dead technology and then I am screwed.
I find it hard to trust Google to maintain any software nor to write software that is maintainable by a community. They write software for themselves and themselves alone.
Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
#119If you've seen this before, it's worth looking at the 2025 roadmap – it's long-term work, a full safety story hasn't been quite figured out (TBD end 2025), and 0.1 is TBD end 2026. About the pace of Rust, although without the active forum that Rust had in its early days. https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/docs/project/roadmap.html What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the…
> What _is_ interesting is that I get the impression that Carbon is being workshopped with the C++ community, rather than the wider PLT community -- I worry that they won't benefit from the broader perspectives that'll help it avoid well-known warts elsewhere. FWIW, we're working hard whenever looking at an aspect of the language to look at other languages beyond C++ and learn any and everything we can from them. Lot…
Chandler I would love to be involved in Carbon development to shape its development to be usable at my company or alternatively to use it in my own projects. What is the best way to stay involved in Carbon development? Just the discord?
Re: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to disagree, but to amplify - FWIW, most of what you say was also the sales pitch for C++ over ANSI C in the early 90s vs. the "pure Java" mentality that shortly followed in the late 90s (with a megaton of Sun Microsystems marketing to re-write almost everything rather than bridge with JNI). People neglect how practical incrementalism can be. Also, FWIW, it is very ergonomic for Nim to call C (though the reverse…
Source-to-source translation is definitely planned. We've even done some early experiments. But we need to get the language and interop into good shape to be able to thoroughly test and evaluate the migration.
Is there a compiler, maybe an online one, for Carbon, or some way to compile and run Carbon code? And if not, what are the plans for that?