Comment by curious9999
1 day ago
> Most likely the raise of AOT compiled alternatives, for scenarios where C and C++ were only being used due to being compiled languages, big names in C++ compiler world rather put money on their own alternatives, are the two main reasons of the slow down.
What alternatives?
Rust claws at market share but has problems with basic stuff like doubly linked lists, WIP gccrs and memory unsafety, Carbon looks like a meme with too few people working on it, Ada has a neglected dialect and a proprietary dialect, Go has garbage collection, Zig has not even reached 1.0, Swift is more of an application language than a systems language, Circle is dead.
What else is there?
Not that C++ doesn't have challenges.
> Rust claws at market share but has problems with basic stuff like doubly linked lists, WIP gccrs and memory unsafety,
Doubly linked lists aren’t that important today. Rust doesn’t need gccrs to be useful, and it gives much better memory safety than C++ without needing a GC. So I find your criticism of Rust seems a bit weak. Rust is a strong alternative to C++.
> Doubly linked lists aren’t that important today.
I guess Rust is just not a viable or good language if one cannot even implement easily something as basic as a doubly linked list. Doubly linked list is the bare minimum; if that is not easy to implement, more complex data structures will often be even worse.
Rust, contrary to public claims, often does worse on memory safety than C++, which is a sad state of affairs.
I fear my arguments are way stronger than yours, sorry. Please make it easier to implement data structures in Rust.
> Rust, contrary to public claims, often does worse on memory safety than C++, which is a sad state of affairs.
Nonsense! Where do you get that from?
Aslo, you can make easily make linked list, it's just not a recommended data structure.
2 replies →
Go, Java (GraalVM/OpenJ9), .NET (Native AOT, .NET Native, IL2CPP, Mono AOT), Swift, Objective-C, D, Nim, Ada.
Many people that use C and C++, do it out of habit, any compiled language, even with AOT is capable to deliver for most scenarios in userspace code.
99% of user software written in compiled languages isn't systems programming juggling pointers and type casts.
Even when that is the case, all above languages have FFI features, no need to rewrite the whole thing.
You might have noticed that C and C++ are minority languages in the mobile OS duopoly, for starters, being used only for low level OS services, and game engines.
I think it is fine for C and C++ to be relegated for use caches where they make the most sense. I don't see the point of comparing them to niches, markets or cases where for instance garbage collection is fine.
And, I already mentioned Go, Swift and Ada.
Objective-C is not really on my radar, it's specific to Apple, and it doesn't seem like Apple is betting on it for the future.
D and Nim are languages with low momentum relative to others.
I am not sure the AOT approach will work. Maybe, maybe not. There are direct and indirect obstacles, I believe. D is probably interesting here; as I understand it, it supported both GC and no-GC. But, that meant that a lot of libraries used GC, and thus were not necessarily good options for applications that required no-GC. In some ways, a programming language can also be what people build with it and what its ecosystems are like.
>Ada has a neglected dialect and a proprietary dialect
What on earth are you on about? That’s not the case.
Ada 2022 has been released and Ada 202x is getting improvements. Those features are trickling into FSF GNAT (GCC).
Are you talking about the SPARK dialect, where GNATprove is open source?
It was indeed the SPARK dialect I am referring to.
I find the Ada community difficult to navigate, the existence of multiple dialects does not make it easier. Please do correct me if I am wrong, and I apologize for any mistakes that I might have made.
If it is not the case that the SPARK language or its proprietary compiler is ahead of what is available publicly, why does this page say that pattern matching is in production:
https://github.com/AdaCore/ada-spark-rfcs/blob/master/featur...
While as far as I can tell, it is not part of normal, not-SPARK Ada, and either is not available in open source compilers, or might require enabling an extension?
My apologies for getting frustrated. I shouldn’t have done that.
Pattern matching is available as a language extension (currently) exclusive to GNAT GCC. It’s not in the reference manual, which means it’s not part of standardised Ada (yet). It’s intended to be an experiment or prototype for what will eventually become a standardised language feature (the standardised feature may be different, or it could be rejected, as the standardisation committee is composed of multiple compiler vendors).
As is, that pattern matching feature works in both normal Ada and in SPARK mode on GNAT GCC 15.2. The flag to enable it is “-gnatX0”. Please see these: https://godbolt.org/z/d55ddznfn https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gnat_rm/Case-pattern-matching... https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.1.0/gnat_rm/How-to-act... In the Godbolt example, that is in normal Ada.
You are not alone in finding the Ada community difficult to navigate. The “ada-spark-rfcs” repository you linked is a community outreach program of AdaCore to solicit feedback from programmers in venues they’re more likely to use. Those RFCs are then forwarded to the Ada Rapporteurs Group (ARG) who focus on the development of standardised Ada. Their issues, mailing list and meeting minutes can be found at: http://www.ada-auth.org/arg.html I admit that calling it “ada-spark-rfcs” is kinda confusing - it’s just dumping ground for ideas for Ada and SPARK.
SPARK doesn’t add features to Ada; instead, it’s a subset of features that can be easily proven by SMTs. The special things in SPARK (extra attributes and pragmas, which Ada implementations are allowed to define) are only to aid formal verification. When language features are added, they’re added to Ada first and subsequently potentially enabled in SPARK.
The situation regarding compiler available is confusing and it made me nervous when I was first learning about the language.
GNAT GCC has two versions: FSF and PRO. The FSF (as in the Free Software Foundation) version is the publicly available version that’s in mainline GCC. PRO is for paying customers of AdaCore. From what I can tell, it’s built against an older version of the GCC backend. It tends to get those newest experimental features sooner, but they do trickle into FSF GCC. There have been points in time where I haven’t noticed any difference in feature set between GNAT PRO (according to the release notes) and those in FSF.
SPARK code works with both GNAT FSF and GNAT PRO. The formal verification tool for SPARK, GNATprove, is open source. https://github.com/AdaCore/spark2014
Edit: I’m not affiliated with AdaCore. I’ve never even spoken to one of their employees on the forums. I do use Ada, but only in my “side-business” (not making any money yet lol).
as for rust linked list
https://crates.io/crates/ghost-cell
That seems more an argument against Rust than one for, sorry. Library assistance, not part of the standard library, does not seem to be used much, not many examples.
> Use at your own risks[sic]!
>This is very much an Alpha quality release, at best.
Last update 1 year ago.
Unsafety.
Interesting research, however.
> What else is there?
There’s Nim, which is getting a major overhaul for v3 (cf. Nimony).