On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 8:13 PM, Kristopher Micinski <[email protected]> wrote: > 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
As Dr. Shapiro notes, systems languages with real PL influence are hard to write, because few people are good systems people and good PL people. (I am neither.) There's a long history of programming languages targeting safe systems programming, but I haven't seen a comprehensive list anywhere, which might be an interesting read. (For example, the one I'll throw out is Cyclone,..) kris _______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
