To learn a new language, read its standard library • Hacker News Board

Re: To learn a new language, read its standard library

#241

Post by CRConrad » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 10:32 AM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #238

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could I trouble you to compare Ada and Rust, especially in terms of safety? I'd like to be able to write low-level code without dealing with the insanity of C, and my top picks are Ada (traditional answer to "safe language"), Rust (the up and coming answer to "safe language"), and Pascal (friendlier than C and way better at least for memory safety), but I'm reluctant to learn all of them to sufficient depth to be abl…

Of those three, Ada and Pascal are as I understand it pretty closely related syntax-wise (in the same "family"), so learning one of those will help a lot with the other. I'd recommend starting with Pascal, because of the comprehensive and high quality standard libraries (or "frameworks" -- see related recent HN discussion...) in Free Pascal and Delphi, and because Free Pascal can target a lot of different OSes. OTOH,…

LCL, not FCL: Lazarus Component Library.

Re: To learn a new language, read its standard library

#242

Post by Bayart » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 10:41 AM UTC

Zababa wrote: post #226

Bayart wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a significant niche for such features, we're dozens . That's the reason why people like stuff like Zig. Pointer arithmetic isn't just dangerous, it's cool too.

I'm not saying that memory unsafety is useless or even undesirable, I think the "problem" is that it's the default in "current popular and actually used high-performance languages", which means that stuff that needs to be fast and secure (like web browsers) have a hard time. Maybe my "most of the time" was too strong and I ignored big domains that I don't know. But for the part that I relatively know (web stuff mostl…

I understand your point, but for the most part memory-safety features and speed of execution run contrary to one another.

Garbage collection and bounds checking is big sticking point for systems / high performance programming, and to an extent real-time programming.

As far as I can tell, Rust should be about the limit of what's possible if you want to have your cake and eat it too. But I'll doubt it'll ever replace C for speed-critical applications.

Re: To learn a new language, read its standard library

#243

Post by lcrmorin » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 11:11 AM UTC

I've jsut discovered this approach with python. I usually used google and cookbooks. But I often found myself in position where I tought 'surely there must be a better way to do it'. Reading the standard library really helped me understand how to do some stuff. Best way I found to enforce what I learnt was to rewrite some code with minimal imports.