On Thursday, 23 July 2015 at 17:44:59 UTC, Etienne wrote:
On Thursday, 23 July 2015 at 17:03:31 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
But some of us think general-purpose, native languages are
coming back,
Yes. Now why do you think this is the case? I tried to
articulate it as best I could for now, but Ola has all these
_reasons_ why this isn't the case, which may mean he is right,
but might not.
Native languages are more efficient, they use less power. This
is increasingly important to reduce the greenhouse gas
emissions, to improve battery duration on mobile devices or to
reduce server costs in general.
Yep, I specifically mentioned the mobile and server domains as
places where general-purpose native/AoT-compiled languages are
having a resurgence, obviously for the efficiency reasons Etienne
lists. Being general-purpose simply means that you wouldn't be
limited to one of those domains, and could quickly bridge over to
even newer domains that spring up.
One big trend over the last decade and a half has been the rise
of webapps, where native desktop apps, which are still
predominantly written in native languages, have been
de-emphasized as a result. However, with the rise of mobile and
webapps not doing as well there, for a variety of reasons, native
development is coming back for many apps, at least on the client
side for networked apps.
On the server, as long as you don't really need to scale out, you
have a lot of choices for your tech. But the moment you need to
scale, you'll probably want to go native, at least for your
backend.
