Template Metaprogramming Made Easy (Huh?)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"#ponce" <aliloko at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:h8acpi$21u1$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> At least the problem with many old-school developers is that even though
>> a new language is 10x more readable, 100x more flexible, 1000x safer and
>> 10000x faster to develop with, if it's 0.1% slower than C++, they have no
>> reason to use it. Well, it shouldn't be a surprise given that JVM *is* a
>> VM.
>
> So I'm a 22 yo oldschool developer.
> One reason I hate VM language is not really about speed but that you have 
> few control on what the CPU do, and very few control over memory and cache 
> usage. Compound value types also are often lacking (especially in Java).
>
> See python internal objects size : 
> http://www.codexon.com/posts/memory-size-of-python-objects
> Everything takes 4x the memory it would take in D. Each field access seems 
> to be a lookup into a hashmap. This is plain ugly.
>
> Also, when some part of a program is slow in C / C++ / D, most of time you 
> have a way to speed it up. It may be painful but there is one.
>

Yea, and another issue with VM-only languages is that you can't really use 
them for systems programming (ex, try using Java or Python to write 
firmware, or a commercially-competetive NDS game. And what language is a 
person going to use to implement that VM in? Another VMed langauge? That 
would be pointless). Now, for some people that's not an issue, because they 
may never venture outside of web development and maybe end-user desktop apps 
(Hell, most of the programmers I've met here in Cleveland would never be 
*capable* of going beyond such simple types of software...but that's a whole 
other set of discussions...). But for others that does really limit how much 
use they can get out of it and forces them to divide their effort and focus 
by constantly switching between languages for each type of task. (Count me 
as another old-school 20-something ;)...ugh, but not for much longer...:/ )