More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 12 May 2014 at 16:16:06 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Perhaps the game industry has to start the creation of a 
> language designed for its needs, like the scientific people 
> have done (Julia), the browser ones (Rust), the Web ones have 
> done, etc. With lot of work in less than ten years you can have 
> an usable language.

I don't think games are unique or special. Most games are even in 
the "easy" space by having mostly static data. Meaning the amount 
of unexpected dynamic data is pretty low.  Games also have the 
luxury of redefining the requirements spec to match available 
technology. The games industry does however have its own culture 
and paradigms and fashions… With subcultures.

However, most interactive applications will suffer from the same 
issues if you increase the load so that they run out of headroom. 
Even unix commands like find and grep have latency requirements 
if the interaction is to be pleasant. By good fortune "find" and 
"grep" haven't changed their interface for 40+ years, so they 
were designed for low performance CPUs. That does not mean that 
you cannot design a better "find"-like application today that 
will run into runtime related usability issues if you freeze the 
world.

At the end of the day, a system level language should support key 
strategies used for writing performant system level code in a 
reliable manner. It should also not lock you to a specific 
runtime that you couldn't easily write yourself. It should also 
not lock you to a specific model of how to structure your code 
(like monitors). I am not even sure it should provide OS 
abstractions, because that is not really system level 
programming. That is unixy (Posix) programming. A system level 
programming language should be free of OS and modelling related 
legacy.