"The End of Native Code"

[David Medlock]

Walter Bright wrote:
> pragma wrote:
> 
>> Slashdot had an interesting ask slashdot article yesterday about when 
>> is it the
>> right time to go whole-hog into interpreted/VM style language 
>> development.
>>
>> http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/06/06/12/2044245.shtml
>>
>> As its an issue that we're all familar with, I figured I'd read and 
>> see why this
>> article had 1000+ comments.  I was actually quite suprised to find a 
>> number of
>> people, mostly C++ guys, clamoring for "native compilation plus garbage
>> collection" or some variant thereof.  What was also suprising was the 
>> number of
>> "have you not seen D yet?" replies to these posts, and how well they 
>> were modded
>> *up*.  As slashdot is peer-moderated, this means that registered users 
>> of the
>> site had to take the time to hand out positive reviews on those 
>> particular
>> posts.
>>
>> So I have to say: you guys rock.  Remember, slashdot users pretty much 
>> hung D
>> from the yard-arm on not one but two articles about D.  What I saw 
>> today was a
>> subtle, but noticable shift in this attitude.  The word finally seems 
>> to be
>> getting out.
> 
> 
> I saw the article when it first came out, but I obviously need to go 
> read the followups.
> 
> The gist of the article as I interpreted it is that people go to script 
> languages because they are more productive. Why are they more productive?
> 
> 1) garbage collection
> 
> 2) dynamic typing
> 
> 3) lots of libraries
> 
> D's got garbage collection.
> 
> Dynamic typing is interesting in that while it is more productive, it's 
> a big reason why scripting languages will always be slooow. It's also 
> interesting in that if you look real hard at C++ templates, a lot of 
> what they are used for is to fake dynamic typing.
> 
> D is moving towards what I call implicit typing - I've been taking a 
> hard look at where one is required to specify a type, and instead trying 
> to figure out a way the type can be inferred instead (foreach is a good 
> example). Implicit typing gets D a number of the benefits of dynamic 
> typing with less complexity than the C++ template approach.
  <snip>

Are you saying you will move towards SML like typing (Hindley-Milner type) ?

Please elaborate if you can.

-DavidM