DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language [LWN.net]

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 2:59 UTC (Mon) by atai (subscriber, #10977)
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

why anotheer one? Rust not enough?

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DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 3:29 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (15 responses)

Manual memory management, combined with a motto of "trust the programmer", tells me this is supposed to be an anti-Rust.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 4:46 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (14 responses)

I haven't programmed in C for many years. I still have fond memories of it, but I have even fonder memories of 8 bit micro assembler, and no thank you, I prefer productivity and not spending 90% of my time taking care of stuff that a modern language takes care of.

What the dickens is the point of Hare if it leaves memory management and all that other housekeeping to the programmer? What does it have that C doesn't? I didn't look past the example, and wondered why they didn't begin with the classic "Hello, world". That example and the short blurb don't show enough potential to be a better C than Rust.

Maybe they need better marketing. Or maybe it isn't any better than my 30 second glimpse. I'm not interested enough to learn more.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 11:20 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

> What does it have that C doesn't?

Predictability, most likely. I'm 99% sure it's reaction to the “disaster of UB” of modern world.

Except they don't realize why that disaster happened and it would either stay on the fringe of IT, mostly ignored or the history would repeat itself.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 19:55 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

> Predictability, most likely.
No. It has manual memory management and no mechanism to prevent use-after-free, so there's going to be UB.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 4, 2022 13:26 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Of course there would be UB! And there would be compilers which would “exploit it”. Then history would repeat itself.

That's, of course, in the very unlikely case of it becoming popular enough for that to happen. More likely outcome: this whole thing would die off after a couple more articles published on LWN over the next couple of years.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 11:24 UTC (Mon) by hkario (subscriber, #94864) [Link]

It allows the programmers to do the fun stuff, like reimplementing all of the libraries that do crypto, yaml parsing, networking, etc. (and not have to care about backwards compatibility!) instead of doing Yet Another Business Rules update.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 13:08 UTC (Mon) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (7 responses)

It really has no legitimate reason for our attention. It addresses no actual problem not better addressed elsewhere. Even Zig is better justified, but isn't.

Hare is meant to replace C in the creator's affections. But any language meant to be adopted by C coders is doomed: remaining C coders are defined by having seen a thousand languages go by, and passed on all of them.

Both C++ and Rust address C shortcomings with powerful advances in productivity. Weak-sauce C updates are at best a distraction, at worst compound its problems by siphoning off coders from alternatives. The people they are for don't want them, and new programmers are much better off with actually-better languages.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 14:21 UTC (Mon) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (1 responses)

> remaining C coders are defined by having seen a thousand languages go by, and passed on all of them.

I think that's an overstatement that kinda dilutes your general point.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 4, 2022 13:35 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> I think that's an overstatement that kinda dilutes your general point.

Maybe with “thousands” part. But there definitely have been tens and, depending on how you would count them, hundreds of languages which were expressly designed to be a “better system language than C”. All these C++, Objective C, D and lots and lots of other languages were designed as “C replacements”. Yet they all failed at replacing C.

Which means that remaining C programmers need something extremely compelling to switch. Rust offers that (although it's not clear if that theoretical offer is nice enough in practice), Swift does that, too (although it's an Apple language thus highly unlikely to ever be widely used outside of Apple's ecosystem). Hare? Nope.

Bunch of cosmetic improvements without a clear explanation why it's better than C or hypothetical BoringC/FriendlyC.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 7, 2022 9:01 UTC (Sat) by iustin (subscriber, #102433) [Link] (4 responses)

> But any language meant to be adopted by C coders is doomed: remaining C coders are defined by having seen a thousand languages go by, and passed on all of them.

This might be a slight exaggeration, but I think it is the right statement. Thanks, I'll remember this, it's well said.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 8, 2022 11:49 UTC (Sun) by Vipketsh (guest, #134480) [Link] (3 responses)

I think many people who still use C do so for the same very simple reason I do: it works, has a reasonable community (many libraries) and, most importantly, code written today has a high chance of continuing to work unmodified far into the future. C is the only language which delivers all three, even though that last part is going down the drain these days because of continued exploitation of undefined behaviour. No matter what I find exactly no enjoyment being on a permanent treadmill having to jiffy my code around so that it works again with whatever "awesomeness" the language designers decided to change in the last few months or, even worse, to find that the language has been abandoned and now my code needs a full rewrite in something else. Is this really so bad ?

No, C programmers are not degenerate psychologically challenged moronic narcissists who work day and night just to deliver security issues and bugs to you. Could we be civil and stop looking down on people who code in C, please ?

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 8, 2022 11:55 UTC (Sun) by iustin (subscriber, #102433) [Link] (1 responses)

> No, C programmers are not degenerate psychologically challenged moronic narcissists who work day and night just to deliver security issues and bugs to you. Could we be civil and stop looking down on people who code in C, please ?

I think you misunderstood my reply entirely. I think the post I quoted was valid in the sense of - C programmers have seen enough fads coming by and passing, and yet - as you say - C still works. Not in the sense "they're dumb and cannot adjust".

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 8, 2022 12:04 UTC (Sun) by Vipketsh (guest, #134480) [Link]

Thanks for clarifying and sorry about my misunderstanding.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 8, 2022 16:02 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I think you're taking this the wrong way - the point is that C programmers value the fact that C someone wrote 30+ years ago is still useful C far more than they value any new language feature that's not in C2x (or often, C99 or C90).

As a consequence of this, the bar for "new language that will attract people away from C" is very, very high. The natural instinct of the remaining people who prefer C when faced with a new language is not "oh, that feature is awesome and I will switch language to get it", but "will that language still be usable in N decades time? Can I implement the feature usably in a C library?".

If you do value that long-term stability over the language features, then a new language aiming to attract you has a big hill to climb - being new, it can't point to 30+ years of history like C can, and so how can it convince you that code written for the language as it exists today will still be useful code in 30 years time?

After all, we've established that that's a big chunk of why you use C - because you've seen so many attractive languages come and go in C's lifetime, and you don't want to start a project today that'll be impossible to compile (let alone use) in a decade. And that's a perfectly good reason to prefer C - it's the same reason that a lot of physicists prefer Fortran, because they want their code to still work for cross-checking results decades after a 20 year experiment comes to an end - but it does make it hard for a new language to attract you away from C.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted Feb 23, 2023 14:33 UTC (Thu) by tinydev.art (guest, #163828) [Link] (1 responses)

This programming language doesn't seem to be aimed at you.

Hare seems to be C without all the footguns, with more consistent syntax. It solves the gripes modern C programmers have with C, not the gripes python programmers have with C.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted Feb 23, 2023 17:56 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

manual memory management is C's most infamous footgun.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 4:07 UTC (Mon) by areilly (guest, #87829) [Link] (10 responses)

Or zig, if you want to do without Rust's memory safety efforts. At least zig allows about the right amount of compile-time metaprogramming. I couldn't see any mechanism for macros or compile-time expression evaluation.

The only really astonishing thing that I saw in the tutorial and standard library documents, or rather didn't see, was any mention of threads, parallelism or asynchronous operation. Aren't we about ten years too late for another strictly single-threaded language?

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 7:20 UTC (Mon) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (8 responses)

Yes, Zig is really interesting as a better C. The only downside is that it basically needs whole-program compilation due to how error sets work, but the feature set is impressive and I think C should borrow learn a lot from it.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 13:10 UTC (Mon) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (7 responses)

Yet, Zig also has no legitimate claim on our attention. Both are weak-sauce alternatives that do none of the heavy lifting a modern language provides.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 15:28 UTC (Mon) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think Zig or Vala have any shot at being a major contender. However there is a lot of legacy C code that won't reasonably be converted to C++ or Rust, and in my opinion Zig is a pretty good experiment as to how C could grow to incorporate new features (compile-time metaprogramming, coroutines, etc.) that those legacy projects could use.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 18:17 UTC (Mon) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link] (1 responses)

zig suggests that there is an interesting and fruitful design space enabled by not doing implicit instantiation of generics (I think c++ got implicit instantiation _almost_ by accident because of the way cfront worked, but that was before my time)

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 19:40 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Having to explicitly instantiate templates may certainly have put the kibosh on some of the ridiculous template metaprogramming I've seen in C++. However, I suspect it would have been used anyways because when a language only gives you a limited set of tools and the best thing for turning that screw is a scissor blade, by gosh, someone is going to use that scissor blade. Whether oodles of compiler output when you hold it wrong or gigantic TUs of template instantiations is worse is up for debate.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 15:59 UTC (Mon) by atnot (guest, #124910) [Link] (3 responses)

Come on, that's a bit far. Zig has plenty of things to offer, most importantly excellent no-bindings interoperability with C and C++, interesting approaches to async and more comprehensive compile-time evaluation and metaprogramming than any other native non-research language I'm aware of. Rust's C interop and macros look primitive and poorly integrated in comparison.

It's not transformative, sure, and I'm not sure I would start a greenfield project in it today. It definitely sacrificies more robustness for it's great C-compatibility than I'm personally comfortable with. But it's a compelling option for people with existing C codebases or complex C libraries and contributes some genuinely new and interesting approaches to writing expressive low level code. It's very far from being just an 80s nostalgia roleplay language.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 23:37 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (2 responses)

Zig has excellent interop with *C++*, really? I don't see that.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 3, 2022 0:07 UTC (Tue) by atnot (guest, #124910) [Link] (1 responses)

Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned C++ considering the advantages are less apparent there (or arguably it is even behind compared to bindgen and cxx's capabilities).

But either way, there's a lot more to compatibility than just understanding the language constructs. A lot of existing C and C++ code, unfortunately, has very unclear data ownership and mutability. Trying to wrap that in a language with much different and stricter memory semantics is usually a pretty bad time. I have given up on it multiple times before. So while Zig may not understand C++ headers (yet?), I do think it's already much closer to working well with it by default.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 3, 2022 11:00 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

In modern C++ you're going to have a lot more cases where ownership is represented via a smart pointer (std::unique_ptr or std::shared_ptr), which is something Rust can get behind easily, but Zig can't really help you with. So it's probably going to shade over, C++ code that's mostly 15-20 years old may be happier to work with from Zig, while C++ code that's all written after say C++ 14 might be much easier to work with from Rust via one of the C++ FFI libraries like cxx which understands the standard library smart pointers.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 31, 2022 0:05 UTC (Tue) by federico3 (guest, #101963) [Link]

Why Zig when you can use Nim?