D vs. C#

[Walter Bright]

Robert Fraser wrote:
> Walter Bright Wrote:
> 
>> Considering that a C compiler exists for a far broader range of
>> devices than VMs do, all the motivation that is needed is the
>> language needs to be a) popular or b) have huge resources from a
>> company like Sun to finance development of all those VMs. Sun could
>> just as easily have provided a generic back end & library.
> 
> I'm not o sure about that. For example, I did some development for
> BlackBerry devices, which don't have a native code generator (or
> spec) available outside RIM. All external BlackBerry applications
> must be deployed in Java.

Why couldn't RIM provide a back end as easily as a Java VM? Like I said, 
a simple back end could be as easy as:

	push operand
	push operand
	call ADD
	pop result

Notice how close that looks to java bytecode! But it'll still execute 
much faster.

 > This has the added advantage of security
 > and reliability, since there's no way an errant application can break
 > the entire device, and allows RIM to change the instruction set
 > architecture at any time.

If the language has no pointers, and RIM provides the compiler for it, 
that is just as secure.

> Of course, that distribute-binaries-as-source thing would work, too,
> but imagine sticking a whole lexer/parser/semantic/code generator on
> a mobile device... that processing power is better spent actually
> executing the application.

It's about 500K of rom needed. And the code will run several times 
faster, even with a simplistic code generator, which will make up for it.