virgil language

[Robert Fraser]

bearophile wrote:
> For a language like D that is still in development stage, it can be positive to take a look at other languages now and then. The "virgil" language is designed for embedded microcontrollers (EM), that's a very different situation from the PC (but D often looks like a superset of C, and C variants are the most used languages for EM, beside assembly, so it's not a totally different situation). EM often have few kbytes of ROM and even only few hundreds of bytes of RAM. So you have to use as little memory as possible (you cross-compile it on a PC, where you have much more resources). Despite such strong limitations, the virgil language is quite more powerful than C, it has strong typing, full OOP, delegates, it has quite advanced ways to reduce memory footprint, it's high-level enough, and it has some interesting sides. This is an interesting quotation from its docs:
> 
> http://compilers.cs.ucla.edu/virgil/overview.html

I'd love to see the front end's interpreter get beefed up. Right now its 
inability to allocate, as well as the fact it doesn't discard even 
stack-allocated data make it unsuitable for general-purpose 
initialization and code generation.