On Monday, 8 April 2013 at 06:35:27 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
I do understand that, the thing is that since I am coding in
1986, I remember people complaining that C and Turbo Pascal
were too slow, lets code everything in Assembly. Then C became
alright, but C++ and Ada were too slow, god forbid to call
virtual methods or do any operator calls in C++'s case.
Afterwards the same discussion came around with JVM and .NET
environments, which while making GC widespread, also had the
sad side-effect to make younger generations think that safe
languages require a VM when that is not true.
Nowadays template based code beats C, systems programming is
moving to C++ in mainstream OS, leaving C behind, while some
security conscious areas are adopting Ada and Spark.
So for me when someone claims about the speed benefits of C and
C++ currently have, I smile as I remember having this kind of
discussions with C having the role of too slow language.
But important question is "what has changed?". Was it just shift
in programmer opinion and they initially mislabeled C code as
slow or progress in compiler optimizations was real game-breaker?
Same for GC's and VM's.
It may be perfectly possible to design GC that suits real-time
needs and is fast enough (well, Manu has mentioned some of
requirements it needs to satisfy). But if embedded developers
need to wait until tool stack that advanced is produced for D to
use it - it is pretty much same as saying that D is dead for
embedded. Mythical "clever-enough compilers" are good in theory
but job needs to be done right now.
