- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).
On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?
Languages with GC
I appreciate your answer, but I mentioned systems programming, because I was more interested in languages that do not rely on a garbage collector.
To play devil’s advocate, most systems programming can be done even with a garbage collector. Midori was a project to build an operating system on a variant of C#, and although the garbage collector did impose technical difficulties, it wasn’t a dealbreaker. Go isn’t usable everywhere Rust is, but it can in fact be used for many things that previously would have been considered “systems” niches (which is part of why there was a somewhat prevalent misconception in the early days of Rust that they were similar languages). Prominent D developers have defended D’s garbage collector (even though it’s technically optional). Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, used to express great confidence that C++ would one day have a garbage collector.
…but you’re right, Rust and its rise in popularity (and, conversely, the C++ community’s resistance to adopt anything with garbage collection) have definitely narrowed the common definition of “systems programming” to exclude anything with a “thick” runtime.
I enjoyed the facts spit above.
Huh, I totally missed that my bad