Not to drench the end of this with gasoline. Yes, C is prone to memory leaks
and bugs from misuse. That's why they made C++. :-)
Since when did C++ fix the tendency towards memory leaks? Even Objective C, which uses a Smalltalkish object model and has garbage collection, is not particularly immune to memory leaks. ;)
As you say, no programming language will solve all your problems for you. Interpreted languages like Python may make it easier to write code which does not leak, but they may not necessarily scale well for a server of multiple thousands of users. (I admit I've never done scalability tests on Python code, so maybe it can in this case.) Similarly, native, compiled code may be able to do more in terms of integrating with a desktop OS environment (providing spellcheck services on OS X from system dictionary, providing system tray services on Windows, etc.) but you lose the easy cleanup and less-headachy memory management of an interpreted language.
Like you said, there's no silver bullet.
Rather than see us all going over what should be done to produce one 'reference implementation,' (or what language would be best to write it in,) I would rather see a process and set of tools for testing how well a given thing adheres to spec. A 'client' which will connect to a server, try all kinds of things automatically and record the results, flagging abnormalities, making it easy to 'certify' a server as fully compliant. A 'server' a client can connect to and do things, to make it easier to test the compliance for the client and get certification.
Yeah, I know, I tried this once before, to push for various Jabber certification programs, for servers and clients and components, but I think really it would benefit us here. As has been pointed out, real-world implementations often differ slightly from JEPs, and so sometimes various bits of software don't always agree on how to do the same thing on XMPP or Jabber.
I really do still think being able to standardize, both on what features are supported for various levels of certification, and for how rigidly those implementations adhere to specification, would be of immense value.
I'm sure everyone who is on standards-jig has gotten tired of me tossing two pennies in, but there's my $0.02 on this. ;)
-- Rachel 'Sparks' Blackman -- sysadmin, developer, mad scientist "If it is not broken, give me five minutes to redesign it!"
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