Richard Esplin <[email protected]> writes:
> Has anyone here played with Go yet?
>
> I have been hankering for the easy development practices of a
> scripting language like Python or Ruby in a language that compiles to
> fast binary code.
>
I haven't played with Go, but I've read a bit about it. I don't think
it really has much in common with Python or Ruby at all; it's much more
like C, but with a lot of warts removed and some powerful new features
attached. Oddly, one of its primary features is that the *compiler* for
it is really fast, which I guess can be a big issue when you've got a
gigantic C++ codebase. If it catches on, it'll also be easy to make
fancy IDEs for it.
>
> Anyone know of an alternative that provides the best of all worlds?
>
The D language provides something similar, though it's more like
C++/Java than it is like C. If you want to move beyond the C family,
OCaml produces blazing fast executables (so long as you don't need
multi-core threading) and OCaml language skills translate pretty easily
to the .net/mono platform via F#, if that interests you.
If by 'fast binary code' you don't mean 'fast binary code in a small,
redistributable executable file' you can add various Common Lisp
implementations, Java, .net stuff, etc. which all have some form of
optimizing compilers.
I don't think there's anything that qualifies as the best of all worlds,
though.
--Levi
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