[cap-talk] Confessions of a C programmer

[Bill Frantz]

marc.d.stiegler at hp.com (Stiegler, Marc D) on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 wrote:

>For Bill, who only learns a new language once every 20 years or so, he should make the leap to 
>Ocaml/F# direct. If he learns C# instead, he'll have to wait another 20 years before he can learn a 
>language that doesn't require all those endless type declarations :-)

What I really should do is act my age, be retired, and avoid writing any
more programs. And, I'll claim that the assemblers I still know are fairly
light on type declarations. :-)


On a more serious note, languages with lots of features, such as
threading[1], are more difficult to implement in limited environments
(unless the features do not use OS facilities/system calls). Languages
which use threading internally are even more problematical. (Imagine taming
away the thread references in the Java libraries.)

Languages with a run-time interpreter, such as Java, have the issue of
verifying what is usually a fairly large C program. The upside is that the
verification effort covers a large number of things you might want to
write, and there many other eyes testing the same body of code. The
downside is that you may have to port and verify a number of features which
are inconvenient to cleanly port.

Cheers - Bill

[1] Threading is a fine example of a feature many people like which would
be better handled in CapROS by building separate communicating instances
ala E vats.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz        | Airline peanut bag: "Produced  | Periwinkle
(408)356-8506      | in a facility that processes   | 16345 Englewood Ave
www.pwpconsult.com | peanuts and other nuts." - Duh | Los Gatos, CA 95032