D and Nim

Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Mon Jan 5 06:51:56 PST 2015


On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 14:22:04 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 13:47:24 UTC, Paulo  Pinto wrote:
>> For C++ there is the Itanium ABI, COM/WinRT on Windows and the 
>> upcoming C++17 ABI.
>
> If there will be a C++17 ABI and it is adopted, then that will 
> be the beginning of the end for C++ IMO. (Wishful thinking... 
> ;-)

For your reference, http://isocpp.org/files/papers/n4028.pdf

>
>> Yes there are lots of options, still the ones that live longer 
>> as system programming languages, are the ones that get OS 
>> vendor adoption.
>>
>> So far, it has always been the case.
>
> By my definition of "system level programming" the only adopted 
> system level programming language since the 1980s has been C 
> (and C++ only as C-with-bells-and-whistles). Then you have some 
> fringe languages such as Ada, and now probably also Rust as it 
> is approaching version 1.0.

Yes, C, C++, Ada have all been adopted by OS vendors for systems 
programming (bare metal/full OS stack).

>
> I cannot really see Nim or D taking that slot. They appear to 
> have too wide a scope. I think only a focused language that can 
> bring along better optimization and manual memory handling has 
> a chance against C/C++ in system programming. (We have to 
> remember that C/C++ are moving too with various extensions that 
> also are gaining traction: OpenMP, Cilk...)

Sadly me neither. I think C++11/14 has improved the language 
quite a lot.

For those willing to wait until 2017, it will look even better, 
assuming modules and concepts lite get in.

Clang/XCode also brought the .NET/JVM tooling capabilities to 
C++, which is being adopted by other vendors (JetBrains, 
Microsoft, ...).

However, the majority of C++ code out there is mostly pre-C++98 
in style. So what I got to learn from CppCon 2014 videos is that 
I should not miss my C++ days at work.

It also remains to be seen what Apple and Microsoft do with their 
new babies (Swift, .NET Native, Dafny).

--
Paulo


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