Itcy-BitC closures and curries

[bearophile]

Jonathan S. Shapiro:

> I hadn't been aware of BitC surfacing here on the D discussion group.

I guess I'm the cause for that :-)
Welcome here, it's an honour to see you here.


> I want to be careful to respect the fact that this is a place for
> discussing D, but many of the objectives of the two languages are
> similar, so as long as Walter doesn't feel I'm intruding it may be
> useful to share some ideas and thoughts.

I'm sure Walter doesn't think of you as an intruder, he is an accepting person, and your knowledge of computer science is probably higher than most people here.

Indeed BitC and D share some purposes, but there are also significant differences. One of the main ones is that D is designed to not innovate unless it's required, so D steals ideas from other languages, and it does it only when such ideas are already tested as useful. D2 language has some new features, but for many of its features and characteristics it's still a traditional C-class language.

Regarding your sharing of ideas, I think that's not how this newsgroup works. D devs are more practical people :-) So you have to be more focused in your proposals, questions, suggestions, etc, if you want answers and comments. Keep in mind that D is not an academic language, and several advanced ideas from functional languages are not so understood here (despite D2 now has some basic functional features). Personally I have understood only half of your post, but I'm not a D dev, I'm more like the Jester.


> The current BitC implementation does not have a GC. For prototype
> purposes we rely on the Boehm collector. I'm well aware of the
> pitfalls of that collector from bitter experience, and we view it as
> a placeholder solution only.

BitC, C# running on Mono, D2 and other languages are all independently trying (or they wish someday) to develop a good GC. I can't help but see a strong duplication of efforts here. One problem is that they have different requirements and needs.

Bye,
bearophile