Martin D. expressed similar concern during yesterday hangout. IMO the choice of language is something that cannot easily be discussed as a system-wide directive. Naturally, it makes little sense to rewrite existing stuff in a different language, but the nice property of our multiserver design is that you can actually write a single new driver in Go while leaving everything else untouched. I do not see a reason to expressly require every single piece of system to be C, if another language serves the purpose well.
My concern is more to keep the entry barriers for any prospective HelenOS developers low, keeping the external prerequisites low and avoiding an overly early proliferation of an untested technology (untested in the context of HelenOS) in our code base.
It's not that anybody is forbidding you to write an optional server or an application in Go (actually having some sample servers and clients should be more than beneficial) or reimplementing some core component of HelenOS in Go in a more distant future.
But as Jiri put it, with respect to the core components, let's wait for a broader discussion and consensus before introducing Go into non-optional parts of HelenOS. There is simply no reason to rush it, especially considering that the run-time is not in the mainline yet.
This has nothing to do with Go or any other particular language (there were plans to introduce the support for C++ many years ago; same for Java; we still have no core components written in Sysel). The caution is really just motivated by the matters from the first paragraph.
M.D. _______________________________________________ HelenOS-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel
