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C, Objective-C, C++... D! Future Or failure?
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Apr 19, 2004 08:03 AM
from the yet-another-programm-language dept.
from the yet-another-programm-language dept.
TDRighteo writes "OSNews is carrying a quick introduction to a programming language under development - D. Features include garbage collection, overrideable operators, full C compatibility, native compilation, inline assembler, and in-built support for unit testing and "Design by Contract". With all the discussion about the future of GNOME with Java/Mono, does D offer hope of a middle-road? Check out the comparison sheet."
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The D Programming Language, Version 1.0 570 comments
penguinblotter writes in a journal article: "Soon, Walter Bright is scheduled to release version 1.0 of the D Programming Language. D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability. D has appeared on Slashdot a few times before, and Walter has continued to add more and more features. Most Slashdot community comments in these articles have been offered on feature X or spec Y without reading through the extensive D newsgroup archives. It has been here over the past seven years where extremely gifted and experienced programmers hashed out discussions and arrived at excellent implementations of all the ideas discussed." Read on for the rest of penguinblotter's writeup.
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wow (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait...
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
For the pedantic - I consider this post to be about the zlxrt language.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
You guys are all behind the times. I'm already on E!
Yeah - turn up that thumping music man!!!
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Re:wow (Score:5, Informative)
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Microsoft will come out with it's own version (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Microsoft will come out with it's own version (Score:5, Funny)
Cue loads of VD jokes
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Re:Microsoft will come out with it's own version (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Microsoft will come out with it's own version (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Microsoft will come out with it's own version (Score:5, Funny)
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full C compatability? (Score:4, Interesting)
In "small program" languages like perl, giving people lots of ways to do things is a feature. In a "large program" language, providing both C compatability and garbage collection is a maintainability nightmare. You'll have people who use both, or worse yet, who only understand one, so to understand the mixed code that results from a hybrid langage like this, you'll have to be utterly proficient with -both- languages.
Re:full C compatability? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:full C compatability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's not handled by D's garbage collection, it still needs to be freed. I'm sure this will make those developers who love to leak memory even worse.
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Re:full C compatability? (Score:5, Insightful)
It happens a lot. I've seen a few expensive C-based libraries that clearly show their designers struggled with the classic caller-callee allocation dillema and lost. Debugging memory leaks in programs that use these libraries is typically hopeless and requires high effort-versus-progress computationally-expensive run-time checks to find them. I like C quite a bit, but it is disheartening to see such a simple malloc() function cause so much pain.
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Re:full C compatability? (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I'd really like to see in Java is Object.free(), which would tell the garbage collector that the object is garbage and can be freed, and cause any further use of the object to throw a FreedMemoryException. This would be useful both as a hint to the system (letting it get rid of things the object references early) and as a debugging aid (so you can find cases where stuff remains in use after you don't think it will). Of course, it violates Java's sandbox design to have a C-style free() which recycles the address space.
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Re:full C compatability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just about anything you need, there's a C library for it.
Think nice things like opengl,pam,openssl,GUI librairies, database
libraries, and heaps more.
Having access to those is very nice, and you don't have to wait anyone
to port those to a new language(which probably won't happen anyway.)
I'd imagine how far C++ had gotten if it couldn't use C libraries..
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Don't need to imagine -- it was the whole point (Score:5, Informative)
Stroustrup is on record many times over as saying that link compatibility with some existing language was a design criterion for him. If not C, then something else.
It is an axiom in the C++ community that compatibility with C is both C++'s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
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Re:full C compatability? (Score:5, Insightful)
For those of us who don't like unpredictable...
pauses...
in our programs while the garbage collector does its work, will we be able to turn off garbage collection entirely or run the garbage collector only at specified times?
directly, them you're a good enough programmer to ensure that you've called for each new. And with std::auto_ptr, it's as easy as How much simpler does it need to be?I'll answer my own question: even if this is possible, if D ever becomes a serious language, we will be using libraries written by other people, libraries that do rely on garbage collection.
So, no, we won't (realistically) be able to turn off the garbage collector, which means that we won't be able to write real-time programs, and it'll even be touchy writing programs, such as, oh, audio or video players, that require near real-time performance. (Not to mention the disappointment we all felt with the various java window-widget APIs (AWT, Swing) that looked great but couldn't run fast enough to respond to the mouse.)
Look folks, taking care of your own garbage wasn't possible in C for a library writer (even ones returning opaque pointers to structs that allocated their own memory) because you had to rely on the library user to call your cleanup function(s).
But the library user could clean-up. The problem was essentially that some programs didn't care enough to be careful -- pointers actually had to be tracked.
Now, it's fine if a library user wants to add on a garbage collector by re-writing malloc to track allocations. But libraries, which are intended to be used by lots of programmers, to write code, and by lots and lots of end users who run code should not use garbage collectors themselves -- because that forces the library user to use garbage collection too.
But in C++, library writers can write libraries that take care of their own garbage even when used by careless users, because the compiler will automatically call class destructors which can do clean-up. (Yes, except in the case of derived classes -- the writer of the derived class has to explicitly write a dtor to ensure the parent class dtor is called.)
And in C++, with the Standard Template Library, there's little need for non-library writers to do explicit allocation at all -- std::vector and std::string and std::auto_ptr, just by themselves, take care of most of the problems of memory leaks and buffer overruns.
If you're using C++ and you feel that you're a good enough programmer that there's real need for you to be calling
So why complicate things with garbage collector and tracking down circular references and unpredictable pauses? Garbage collection is a bad answer for non-trivial programs, and pretty much necessary for trivial programs.
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Re:full C compatability? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:full C compatability? (Score:5, Informative)
My point was that to avoid the problem of circular references, the garbage collector does have to be more sophisticated, and sophistication takes time and (memory) space -- time and space that a program may or may not be able to spare.
"for very many applications modern garbage collectors provide pause times that are completely compatible with human interaction. Pause times below 1/10th of a second are often the case,"
Pause times below 1/10th of a second? Hmm, how much below? TV-quality video is 24 frames per second, so a one-tenth second pause means dropping two or three frames. Acceptable? Perhaps, but not desirable.
"Does garbage collection cause my program's execution to pause? Not necessarily."
Yes, if you read my post carefully -- perhaps you missed a word or two when the garbage collector in your head did some clean-up -- I didn't say that pauses were inevitable. My complaint -- and not just mine, it's no revelation that garbage collection has may detractors -- is that the pauses are not predictable by writer of the program.
With non-garbage collected language, I know that memory allocation will either succeed ort fail, and I know (or a library writer knew) when allocation happens, because I'm explicitly coding it. So I know, at this particular point in my program, either allocation succeeded or failed.
But garbage collection can happen at any time, and cause a pause at any point in my program -- even when I'm needing to re-fill under-run buffers or read volatile memory or make time-critical choices. With garbage collection, I no longer have an algorithmic program, in which I can say what it's doing at any particular point in the code.
Then come back and make some informed comments, instead of spouting nonsense. Thank you.
That overly hostile arrogance suggests you're either a zealot or a fourteen year-old. That sort of blustering generally indicates someone who isn't that confident in himself or his argument, and so wishes to preempt questioning by being a posturing like a "tough guy"; it's particularly prevalent on the net -- though I'll grant that you didn't hide behind an Anonymous Coward post. Adults can disagree and discuss things without resorting to insults and attitude -- and I think you'll be able to do that too, with a little more experience.
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Re:full C compatability? (Score:5, Informative)
No it doesn't. Handling of circuler references falls naturally out of most GC algorithms. One of the simplest possible memory algorithms is the mark & compact GC, which handles circuler references naturally.
Pause times below 1/10th of a second? Hmm, how much below? TV-quality video is 24 frames per second, so a one-tenth second pause means dropping two or three frames.
You disable the GC in those cases. A good GC will give you the option to manually manage memory in certain cases (say, through a pool allocator), so in any time-sensitive paths, you can disable the GC and rely on those other options. There are also real-time GC's that have absolutely bounded pause times.
But garbage collection can happen at any time, and cause a pause at any point in my program -- even when I'm needing to re-fill under-run buffers or read volatile memory or make time-critical choices.
You do realize that you have this issue with any modern OS? A malloc() can take tens of thousands of clock-cycles if it decides to mmap() to get more backing memory, and the kernel decides to block the app.
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Old news (Score:4, Interesting)
2. Java and
3. If a new popular language does come on the scene, you won't notice it until it has nearly taken over the world. Oh, and developers will love it so much they'll drop everything else (like what happened with Java).
Obligatory java response... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obligatory java response... (Score:5, Informative)
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Sounds like a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I it is doubful it will gain a foothold in the current ocean of multiple, semi-specialized languages.
D @ Google (Score:5, Informative)
Computers > Programming > Languages > D [google.com]
New programming languages are interesting, and sometimes I wonder what the next "big thing" will be. Will we have another big, revolutionizing, new concept like "object-oriented programming" that you simply must know in a near future?
Re: Fads (Score:5, Insightful)
There are fads in programming just as there are in clothing and management methodologies. And there are always people telling you to adopt the flavor of the month, I mean wave of the future if you don't want to become obsolete.
And you can usually ignore them.
I sat out PL/1, which, well, gee, it had BIG BLUE behind it (in a day when IBM's domination was far more complete than Microsoft's is now). And it doesn't seem to have done me much harm.
True, you can score big by being the person who actually has the "two years experience in" (language-that's-only-existed-for-two-years) that the recruitment ads want, but if you go this route remember that it's easy to be knowledgeable in the latest language if you've just spent some unpaid years in college learning it. If you want to make a career out of always having the skill that's in demand, keep in mind that the only reason the skill is in demand is because it is rare--and you'll need to be quite clever at guessing the next fad, and dedicated about finding out how to educate yourself in it while keeping your day job.
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Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Dropping multiple inheritance ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Dropping multiple inheritance ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Looking forward to job ads (Score:5, Funny)
Looking forward to job ads saying :
Duh !!
A, B, C, D, ... R! (Score:5, Funny)
C! (Score:5, Funny)
with apologies to eminem...
to the tune of 'without me'
Two GUI classes go on the inside; on the inside, on the inside
Two GUI classes go on the inside; on the inside, on the inside
Guess who's back Back again C is back Tell a friend
Guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back
guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back..
Sun's created a monster, cause nobody wants to code Java no more
or basic, but something quicker
Well if you want speed, this is what I'll give ya
A language called C that won't let you do "is a"
Some "has a" that makes me feel sicker
than the bugs when I build patch that's critical
using make to compile and be building
with a language that allows object orientating
Your var name's too long, now stop line breaking
Cause I'm back, I'm a new var and instantiating
I know that you got a job Bill and Steve
but your company's trust problem's complicating
So GCC won't follow ANSI or copy memory, so let me see
They try to recompile with visual C But it feels so bloated, without C
So, connect with SLIP, or create a RIP Fuck that, write a function, and shift some bits
And get ready, and use a pattern like proxy MS just settled their lawsuits, expect a levy!
Now this looks like a job for C So everybody, just code in C
Cause we need a little, bit more speed Cause it runs so slowly, without C
Now this looks like a job for C So everybody, just code in C
Cause we need a little, bit more speed Cause it runs so slowly, without C
Little Hallions, MS feelin litigious Embarrassed that users still listen to RMS
They start feelin like ellen feiss 'til someone comes on the television and yells SWITCH!!!
A visionary, beard's lookin' scary Could start a revolution, lives in a bear cave
A rebel, although emacs ain't real fast and there's the fact that I only got one class
And it's a disaster, such a castastrophe for you can see so damn much of my class; meant to use C.
Well I'm back, i-j-k-x-y-z-out-ta-var-names Fix your damn indentifier tune your code and I'm gonna
open it, under vim, maybe pico and variables, no such thing as a member
I'm interesting, the best thing since assembly but not Polluting the namespace with inherits
We're Testing, your functions please Feel the tension, soon as someone commits some C
Here's my webpage, my code is free who'll pay the rent? What, You code with vi?
Now this looks like a job for C So everybody, just code in C
Cause we need a little, bit more speed Cause it runs so slowly, without C
Now this looks like a job for C So everybody, just code in C
Cause we need a little, bit more speed Cause it runs so slowly, without C
An object in
AT&T, you can get your ass kicked worse than those little C++ bastards
And Ruby? just like a static property not even used with KDE and QT
You're not like C, you're too slow, let go It's over, nobody'll code in OO!
Now let's go, -9's the signal I'll be there with a whole list of XM and L
I use SOAP, XPATH with XSL And you know perl's just like coding in symbols
everybody only just codes C so this must mean, some com-pile-ing
but it's just me i'm obfuscating And though I'm not the first king of controversy
And i'm not the worst thing since assembly but I am the worst thing since 86 XFree
do use BASIC and JSP and used it to get myself wealthy
Here's a concept that works twenty million new coders emerge
but no matter how many fish in the sea half of them can't even code C
Now this looks like a job for C So everybody, just code in C
Cause we need a little, bit more speed Cause it runs so slowly, without C
Now this looks like a job for C So everybody, just code in C
Cause we need a little, bit more speed Cause it runs so slowly, without C
Libraries (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice to see a system language (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, kudos to Walter Bright for this little piece. It needn't become popular, if it stays good it's plenty more than enough.
High Hopes (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing about D that bothers me is the inclusion of the Garbage Collector and several other runtime components that occur in the background of your program. I'm not sure I really like that; it sounds a little *too* close to Java, if you get my drift. What I'd really love to see, and what I hope D inspires if not actually implements, is a language with the power of C/C++, but the easier syntax of Java.
D *seems* to be the first step in that direction. I hope it goes further.
Success is Elusive (Score:5, Insightful)
D is certainly a very interesting language;
However, there are many interesting languages. Over the years, I've explored Prolog, Modula-2/3, Oberon, Haskell, Ocaml, and others. All of those embody some very interesting concepts; in some cases. they may be "better" than mainstream languages.
But the fact remains that no one has ever paid me (or anyone else I know) to write code in Ocaml, Haskel, Oberon, Prolog, or D. For the most part, it is C, C++, and Java that feed my family; upon occasion, clients need Python and Fortran 95. I'd love to be paid for a project in D or Ocaml; I'm not going to bet the farm on that happening.
I wish the world of languages (both human and computer) was more diverse -- but reality suggests a hard road to popularity for original concepts like D. I respect and appreciate Walter Bright's abilities; his Zortech compiler paved the way for C++, and provided excellent optimization. I wish him luck in promoting his vision.
Obsession with C-like syntax (Score:5, Insightful)
There are far better syntax models for an object-oriented programming language than C. I wish people who feel a need to create new languages were willing to base their efforts on a framework more suited to their goals.
Bander (in curmudgeon mode)
D does not have dynamic classloader (Score:5, Insightful)
Full C compatibility sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
In sum: C++'s biggest problem is its C legacy. Tear it away, add real type-safety, and you have a language much more powerful and safer than Java.
D WON'T compile C code (Score:5, Informative)
Binary C Compatibility:
D programs can import and link against C code and libraries, providing D with free access to a huge amount of pre-written code. Note, however, that D is not link-compatible with C++, so pure C wrappers are required to access C++ code in D.
Personally, I've been praying for years for a language like this to get adopted. Why is it that I can only use full object oriented programming for web/network applications?! Sure.. I know you can do more than this with Java or C#, but is it really practical?? Usually it's just a massive drain on resources. If you need high performance, then you can't do better than C++. Unfortunately, C++ is a transitional language (just look at it's name..). A pure object oriented, fully compilable language that has no VM is desperately needed. I can't believe it's 2004, and such a thing still hasn't been adopted. I hope D (or something like it catches on.. As much as I loved it when it first came out, I'm sick of wrestling with C++ code.
I was hoping for more C (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sick of C at all. I was hoping for more like ANSI C 04 or something (like ansi c99), more low-level, more control, less objects, less behind-the-scenes crap like garbage collection. The quality of code is always higher with C than C++, unless VERY well programmed with C++, and for that reason alone, C code is reused more despite being less reusable. C++ allows for more cheap right-out-of-college employees, while C gives us quality code that lingers for decades. Think UNIX for a second, and give me an example of something in C++ that has lived so long and so well.
I hate fatter higher-level languages, and we all seem to hate backwards compatibility. If a language has 100 keywords, and you make the next version backwards compatible with 100 more keywords, any sample code can have 200 different keywords in it. Thats making it all tough. C is like RISC, fewer instructions that can be used more creatively, so a smaller amount of code can give you more functionality.
Its all a conspiracy by computer manufacturers. Say you come up with a language that produces binaries slower than Java, all of a sudden a Pentium 3.0GHz with HT is too slow for it, the market keeps pushing for faster and capitalism works. doesnt matter at all that you can run a file/print/mail/application/web server on a 386sx or an ARM MCU 2mm^2 in size running some operating system made in C.
OBJECTIVE-C: APPLE VERSION? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice to see once more another myriad of articles that espouse all sorts of wonderful capabilities while either due to ignorance or purposeful deception leaves Apple's Objective-C compiler out of the comparison list.
No matter. All in due course.
Limbo is the only legitimate successor of C (Score:5, Interesting)
Limbo was developed in Bell Labs by the the same people that created Unix, C, and Plan 9 [bell-labs.com], and someone once described it as "the language the creators of C would have come up with if they had been give and enormous amount of time to fix and improve C", that is exactly what Limbo is.
Dennis M. Ritchie: The Limbo Programming Language [vitanuova.com]
Brian W. Kernighan: A Descent into Limbo [vitanuova.com]
Together with Inferno [vitanuova.com], Limbo forms the best platform for distributed applications.
Inferno and Limbo were recently released under an open source license and you can download them here:
http://cgi.www.vitanuova.com/cgi-bin/www.vitanuov
Inferno/Limbo are the only hope for some sanity in the software industry!
Best wishes
uriel
The problem with C++ (Score:5, Informative)
C++ itself is undergoing a revision. But the plans for it aren't that good.
The big problem with the C++ committee is that most of the members don't want to admit the language has major problems. Neither does Strostrup, who has written that only minor corrections are needed. If that was really true, we wouldn't need all those variants on C++ (Java, D, C#, Objective-C, Managed C++, etc.)
The committee is dominated by people who like doing cool things with templates. Most of the attention is focused on new features for extending the language via templates. It's possible to coerce the C++ template system into running programs at compile time (see Blitz [oonumerics.org]). Painfully. LISP went down this dead end, where the language was taken over by people who wanted to extend the language with cool macros. (See the MIT Loop Macro. [cmu.edu]) We all know what happened to LISP.
What isn't happening is any serious attempt to make C++ a safer language. C++ is the the only major language that provides abstraction without memory safety. That's why it causes so much trouble. C++ objects must be handled very carefully, or they break the memory model. This usually results in bad pointers or buffer overflows. Java, etc. are protected against that. This is the basic reason that writing C++ is hard.
It's not fundamentally necessary to give up performance for memory safety. I've written a note on "strict mode" for C++ [animats.com], an attempt to deal with the problem. I'm proposing reference counts with compile-time optimization, rather than garbage collection. The model is close to that of Perl's runtime, which handles this well.
Garbage collection doesn't really fit well to a language with destructors, because the destructors are called at more or less random times. Microsoft's Managed C++ does that, and the semantics of destructors are painful. With reference counts, destructor behavior is repeatable and predictable, so you can allocate resources (open files, windows) in constructors and have things work. The main problem with reference counts is overhead, but with compiler optimization support and a way to take a safe non-reference-counted pointer from a reference counted object, you can get the overhead way down and reference count updates out of almost all inner loops.
C++ itself isn't that bad. The language could be fixed. But I don't see it happening. Microsoft has gone off in a different direction with C#. SGI, HP, DEC, Bell Labs, SCO, and Sun are defunct or in no position to drive standards any more.
What C++ needs is some hardass in a position to slam a fist on the table and say "Fix it so our software doesn't crash all the time". It doesn't have one.
Re:try, catch, finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Exceptions provide an obvious answer to the problem of how to handle different types of problems. If a file doesn't exist and someone tries to open it, a FileNotFoundException is thrown. If a file exists but the permissions don't allow access, an IOException is thrown.
Exceptions also provide a MUCH cleaner way of propagating errors. If one method calls another method to open a file, and the file can't be opened, how do you tell the original caller that there was a problem? With exceptions, you simply declare that your method throws IOException, and then (typically) skip the try-catch-finally block.
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actually, the more important reason for exceptions (Score:5, Interesting)
Exceptions let you throw the error where it happens and catch it where it makes the most sense, however far down the stack that may be.
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Re:actually, the more important reason for excepti (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:P, not D. (Score:5, Interesting)
See the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Toss out C. (Score:5, Insightful)
Leads to cleaner code, in my opinion. C++ doesn't require you to do it, but I still do.
declare all your functions before using them
What's the big deal about this? If your tired of typing, you either need to learn to copy/paste, use an IDE that will generate code for you, or find a new industry.
C takes much more time to compoile than Java/C# because all the stupid headers take forever to parse.
Ever hear of "Make" and "Makefiles"? You don't need to keep recompiling things than havn't changed.
Pointers are a problem because they allow unsafe code that forces the hardware to make up for lack of security in the software. Repeat after me, security is a software problem.
Pointers, in some capacity, are needed for low level programming. If you don't need access to hardware, then you might have a reason to consider something besides C.
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Re:All the C++ programmers are laughing at you... (Score:5, Interesting)
So if somebody with those credentials thinks there are things we could do better, maybe we should at least take the time to listen to him....
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