Hello Jirka.

The first question, is which languages do we support for use in end-user
> applications, and which of them do we further support for development of
> core servers.


Maybe it didnt seem so but I was talking about the higher-level/more
end-user applications/libraries, for the low-level part I don't have any
experiencie at all,thought it seems reasonable to replace C there (where it
makes sense, of course).

As my bachelor thesis, I implemented an alternative VFS server in Go.
> However, I abandoned Go for servers due to some conceptual problems I
> encountered, and due to lack of time or demand, I haven't finished Go
> support either.


Since Go is a so acclaimed language I would like to hear those problems you
found, maybe you posted them? If you did they went unnoticed for me,

My personal opinion is that the preferred language must make it easy to
> develop safe and error-free software. That means strong static type system,
> lack of undefined/counterintuitive behaviors, support from at least one
> sound static analyzer, and enough expressiveness to make most common
> patterns easy to read and write. [0]


This sounds pretty much like rust, though excepting it's memory model and
the pattern matching I don't find it very interestings. Your terms seems
reasonable, however I find that the development-speed granted by the
easiness of  use and features of interpreted languages may counter those
(only a thought that does not mean I really aprove them), obviously that
only makes sense for the higher-level code. Anyway I think Nimrod combines
the good syntax with a static type system, and I'm pretty sure it allows
enough expressiveness, if you find a moment it may be worthwile to see it
superficially.


The third question, of course, is who is gonna maintain support for the
> languages.


I think that question would depend on which language we ended up agreeing.


>  This is actually a sneaky suggestion that in order to have any chance of
> succeeding, HelenOS needs to build a strong, consistent, stable,
> well-documented, and pleasant to use, foundation for further development.


I think it will help to have clear our directions before building anything.


> In order to actually accomplish any advancement here, the project would
> need a formal governing/planning structure in place, a set of long-term
> goals on multiple levels of design, and a coordinated push in that
> direction.


So, indeed my question seems to have raised the need of structure and goals
(or just made it more apparent). Those seems points to be discussed as soon
as possible (i.e: after the release).

[0] As a side note, I have described my ideal of the "perfect" replacement
> for C earlier this year, and even though I have not written about my effort
> since (lots of school stuff in the meantime), I am currently slowly working
> on the compiler and a static analysis framework. If you are interested in
> commenting, you can find the original post somewhere in February's archive.


I didn't comment on that mainly because I thought you mean a replacement
for the low-level, also I didnt had much to say but maybe if it's also
geared towards (more high-level) application development then I'll take a
look.

I have recently started familiarizing myself with C++11. While I do not
> like the C++ as a whole, the horrible beast it is, I do think that adopting
> some C++ features would benefit HelenOS. Among other things, namespaces
> would allow greater separation of the core library from the standard
> interfaces, which we currently shamelessly clobber, resulting in
> difficulties in supporting software written to standard.


Namespaces would be helpful but I don't like the way are handled in C++, I
prefer how is handled in other languages (such as Nimrod) in which the
namespace is optional, and only required with name clashing, also I don't
know how are these going to be added to our C, and in the case we added
them, it would still being C?

--Sergio





2014-07-02 17:04 GMT+02:00 Jiří Zárevúcky <[email protected]>:

> On 2 July 2014 16:41, Jiří Zárevúcky <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> The second question you are asking is this: Which languages do we
>> emphasize/prefer for this development?
>>
>>
>
> A little more food for thought:
>
> I have recently started familiarizing myself with C++11. While I do not
> like the C++ as a whole, the horrible beast it is, I do think that adopting
> some C++ features would benefit HelenOS. Among other things, namespaces
> would allow greater separation of the core library from the standard
> interfaces, which we currently shamelessly clobber, resulting in
> difficulties in supporting software written to standard.
>
> -- Jirka Z.
>
> _______________________________________________
> HelenOS-devel mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel
>
>
_______________________________________________
HelenOS-devel mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel

Reply via email to