Hacks

Hacks

Posted Oct 23, 2005 22:41 UTC (Sun) by doodaddy (guest, #10649)
In reply to: Hacks by ncm
Parent article: Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance (O'ReillyNet)

Can you be specific? It has gc, which you can start now, or turn off for a while. I think I remember you can work without it. It has "layovers" in the form of structs (while 'class' is more like Java.) It has arrays built in (not a class) with "slices." ...

It has been winning in coding shoot outs for speed, I think due to the slices.

I'm always ready to hear some interesting insights to these things as I fancy myself working on languages some day.

P.S. My last job was in C (with some C++) for a 4 million line code base. I finally see some of the light of Java (though I'm still bothered by it). With 20 years and new front lines of coders, the code was very good and yet... impossible to work with. So many programming paradigms, so many utility libraries, so much cross-platofrm ifdef and libraries, so many different ways to use it. So much control of errors, memory, everything. SO MANY "help" MACROS! Ugh! You could stare at a function and have no idea what it was doing. My point is that I can see why Java wanted to remove control of allocation issues, force libraries to be named the same as files and force a hierarchy of library files. Also, I can see why Java tries to have a standard set of cross-platform libraries and remove macros. To keep this on topic a bit, it seems "big systems" do hang themselves with some of these control structures and removing them might be the way to better real-world code.

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