On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 8:00 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <[email protected]> wrote: > Everything Kristopher says is true, but I think he is being a little hard on > Decca. Decca was an *undergraduate* thesis project. By the standards of > thesis projects, it's a very nice piece of work. > > To answer the original question, Eli Gottlieb and I have exchanged some > email about his project. I think that Decca made some interesting choices > and missed some others. Some of the things that he missed, in my opinion, > are a function of inexperience. To build a good systems language, you have > to be both a systems person and a languages person. It's very hard for > someone that early in their career to be both. Heck. It's hard when you've > been doing both for years, which is why we tried hard to co-develop BitC and > Coyotos. And we *still* got some things wrong. > > I do not have the impression that the Decca project is continuing, so I > doubt that it will turn out to be the winner in the safe systems programming > space. >
I shouldn't have undersold it, it's an amazing piece of work, but the OP seemed to believe that it was the "next" BitC. For an undergraduate piece of work, especially compared to the amount of work *typically* required in such projects (next to nothing), it's very good, but comparable to BitC in the number of man hours put in, or the amazingly large amount of email on the list? Not close. Designing languages is hard, it's that simple, :-). But both projects have served to advance the field with some great anecdotal evidence of what works well, and elaborate upon the kinds of problems you run into when designing real systems. (It always starts out "it's going to be Fast! and Functional! and Verified! And it's going to run Without a Garbage Collector or Runtime System! And we're going to write Real Systems in it!") kris _______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
