GNOME and high-level languages [LWN.net]

GNOME and high-level languages

Posted May 13, 2005 7:24 UTC (Fri) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458)
In reply to: GNOME and high-level languages by ncm
Parent article: A new Harmony Project

I strongly belive that a modern high level language with garbage collection, object orientation, exceptions and such features make high level GUI software easier to write. Is there anything in Beagle that would be impossible to write in C? Of course not. But it would have taken more time, and given that time is finite, this means that the program would have less features, or maybe it wouldn't even have been released.

Allowing people to choose what language to code in allows them to be more productive, since different people like different languages, and different problems are suited to different languages. You are right that if we where to allow the core libraries to be written in Python, Java, Ruby and C#, they would be dog slow. To me, this means that the VMs have to be fixed to become leaner, not that those languages should be forbidden.

BTW, don't think that I don't like older languages like C or C++. I love C and I use it often. I just love the freedom to choose programming languages more.

As to your comments about emacs and bloat, emacs (CVS version 22.0.50) takes about 1.5 seconds to start up on my computer. This is obviously pretty bloated and far to long to be acceptable. I just tried starting OpenOffice (v1.1.2) a few times, it took about 4 seconds on average. So no, emacs does not _define_ bloat, and the fact that you ask this implies that you don't even use OpenOffice, but still you complain about what it does and how it does it.

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GNOME and high-level languages

Posted May 13, 2005 16:11 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

By the way, C++ is unencumbered, supports OO anywhere it's useful, has exceptions that actually work (i.e. actually reduce the amount of error-handling code in your program, instead of multiplying it), and provides the benefits of garbage collection without its ... problems.

If you're talking about modern, though, you neglected to mention compile-time type inferencing. The MLs have it, Haskell has it, C++ has it, Java and C# don't. (What good is it, anyway? It enables writing libraries that are more powerful than is possible in weaker languages.) As modernity goes, Java 1.5 and C# are stuck at about 1991; Java 1 was about 1986.