[cap-talk] Specs for our 'ideal' language?

[David Barbour]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Matej Kosik <kosik at fiit.stuba.sk> wrote:
> would it be a blasphemy to equate `managed code' with `interpreted
> code'? Is there any qualitative difference?

Most 'managed' code is compiled to an intermediate bytecode, and much
of that is then compiled to native by JIT.

The old distinctions between 'compiled' and 'interpreted' code have
been diminishing in utility over the last decade, and will continue to
do so in the foreseeable future as languages move to a more continuous
grey-region between compilation and runtime specialization. Rather
than focusing on interpreted vs. compiled code, it would be better to
concern ourselves with which language constraints support
partial-evaluations, reductions, inlining, and other sorts of
optimizations typically associated with compilation without overly
hindering features or productivity.

>> In combination with concurrency, your memory-safe semantics need also
>> to handle the case of explicit delete from one thread while another
>> thread is still utilizing the memory-object.

I should have also mentioned reentrance, which is also a challenge for
memory-safety with explicit destruction.