Hello Sergio. The way I see it, there are more aspects of the question you are asking.
The first question, is which languages do we support for use in end-user applications, and which of them do we further support for development of core servers. It's not so long ago I myself pushed for support of the Go programming language for both. As my bachelor thesis, I implemented an alternative VFS server in Go. However, I abandoned Go for servers due to some conceptual problems I encountered, and due to lack of time or demand, I haven't finished Go support either. The second question you are asking is this: Which languages do we emphasize/prefer for this development? My personal opinion is that the preferred language must make it easy to develop safe and error-free software. That means strong static type system, lack of undefined/counterintuitive behaviors, support from at least one sound static analyzer, and enough expressiveness to make most common patterns easy to read and write. [0] However, most people here don't share those ideals, so the preferences would vary. The third question, of course, is who is gonna maintain support for the languages. This is actually a sneaky suggestion that in order to have any chance of succeeding, HelenOS needs to build a strong, consistent, stable, well-documented, and pleasant to use, foundation for further development. Currently, HelenOS has none of those qualities, and the conceptual merits of the system's prevalent architectural style only gets you so many developers (that is, not many). In order to actually accomplish any advancement here, the project would need a formal governing/planning structure in place, a set of long-term goals on multiple levels of design, and a coordinated push in that direction. Note that as it stands, monthly meetings mostly consist of recounting individual people's accomplishments, and very little in the way of planning high-level goals and directions. [0] As a side note, I have described my ideal of the "perfect" replacement for C earlier this year, and even though I have not written about my effort since (lots of school stuff in the meantime), I am currently slowly working on the compiler and a static analysis framework. If you are interested in commenting, you can find the original post somewhere in February's archive. -- Jirka Z. On 2 July 2014 14:00, Sergio Tortosa Benedito <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello there again, now I'm mailing because I would like to start a new > conversation, first let me introduce this. HelenOS is growing nice and it > won't be that long before it is "usable" (vaguely usable I mean), and > applications for HelenOS start to appear, so we need a "official" language, > this will help us later on fragmentation and will improve the experience > for those making applications because they will have a standard and nice > framework. The selected language should be the only accepted in the master > branch. > I know we have one C, however C it is not very acceptable in high-level, > so I would like to start a discussion regarding the language. > I think three languages should be selected, one for main programing, > another for scripting applications and another for system scripting. > However, that list is not really closed and there may be more languages or > use the same language for various of these (for example, we could use > python for everything). > > So here's my votes: > - For the main language we could use nimrod. For those who don't know what > nimrod is let me tell that it is a compiled language with lots of features, > whose syntax remembers python's one (indeed I find this to be a python > substitute) and has bits from pascal, one of my favorite features is it's > nice meta-programming support and it's real-time capable GC.Here's the > webpage: http://nimrod-lang.org/ > > - For the scripted language: I would vote Nimrod also if posible but > seeing that it is not posible I would vote for either python or lua. Python > is much more like Nimrod so it won't be very hard for someone who knows > Nimrod to pick up python (and also the other way applies somewhat). I think > Lua is a nice tool here because it really fits as the secondary language , > also is incredibbly fast (with it's JIT implementation showing performance > close to C), maybe it's syntax its not the most pleasant but we can use > something called moonscript which compiles it's own files to lua files, or > even write one ourselves. > > - For the system language I don't know, maybe develop one? maybe use the > scripting one? The only thing I know for sure is I don't want it to be bash. > > So here are my thoughts, I would like to hear yours > > --Sergio > > _______________________________________________ > HelenOS-devel mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel > >
_______________________________________________ HelenOS-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel
