> Look at all the locked-down walled-garden platforms proliferating
I don’t think I’m getting the connection here —- Rust was incubated at Mozilla and is now managed by its own open-source foundation. There’s nothing particularly closed or “walled garden” about it.
By contrast, Apple’s ecosystem is the canonical example of a walled garden. But it’s overwhelmingly programmed in unsafe languages (C, C++, and Objective-C). So what gives?
> It's not hard to see where things are going if you read between the lines. Increasingly, "safety and security" is being used to exert control over the population and destroy freedom
This is an eye-poppingly confusing confabulation: in what world am I any less free because the programs I write and use have fewer trivial vulnerabilities in them? What freedom, exactly, have I lost by choosing to crash less?
You bring up the GNU project; their background is explicitly rooted in Lisp: one of the very first safe, managed languages. The unsafety and comparative messiness of C is one of their standard bugbears. That hasn’t stopped their message of political and software freedom, as you’ve pointed out.
Actually GNU project is one of the culprits for C spreading into a world of that was already moving into C++ and other safer languages.
> When you want to use a language that gets compiled and runs at high speed, the best language to use is C. C++ is ok too, but please don’t make heavy use of templates. So is Java, if you compile it.
> When you want to use a language that gets compiled and runs at high speed, the best language to use is C. Using another language is like using a non-standard feature: it will cause trouble for users. Even if GCC supports the other language, users may find it inconvenient to have to install the compiler for that other language in order to build your program. For example, if you write your program in C++, people will have to install the GNU C++ compiler in order to compile your program.
>
> C has one other advantage over C++ and other compiled languages: more people know C, so more people will find it easy to read and modify the program if it is written in C.
> Actually GNU project is one of the culprits for C spreading into a world of that was already moving into C++ and other safer languages.
Both of these things can be true! GNU has advocated for C for some pretty asinine reasons. At the same time, they’ve ported all kinds of Lisp idiosyncrasies into their style guide.
With the possible exception of Rust, safety always had performance implications. Forcing people to write their program in C# or Swift or Java causes many programs to be slower than they really need to be, forcing us to either wait on them, or buy a faster palmtop.
(Now most devs don't care about performance, so they don't see that as a problem. As a user however I can tell you, I hate when my phone lags for seemingly no good reason.)
> With the possible exception of Rust, safety always had performance implications.
This is common piece of received wisdom, but I don't think it's held up well over the last decade: both Java and C# have extremely well-optimized runtimes that perform admirably after an initial startup period, and (I believe) Swift compiles to native code with many of the same optimization advantages that Rust has (e.g., simpler alias analysis).
At the same time, C++ has seen a proliferation of patterns that are slightly safer, but perform miserably at scale: smart pointers (unnecessary lock contention), lambdas (code bloat, more I$ pressure), templates (I$), &c. C avoids most of these, but C written by "clever" programmers has similar pitfalls.
It should be tested, but I don't think that a JIT compiler can beat an ahead of time compiler when the memory isn't the bottleneck.
Sure, if what you're competing against is some kind of pointer fest, forget about locks, just jumping around the memory will trash your cache, and it won't matter how optimised your local processing is. But if you follow some data oriented principles and take good care of your memory access patterns, I have a hard time imagining Java or C# beating C++ or Rust.
Now there's this peculiar version/subset of C# that Mike Acton was promoting for Unity… though I'm not sure that counts.
I don’t think I’m getting the connection here —- Rust was incubated at Mozilla and is now managed by its own open-source foundation. There’s nothing particularly closed or “walled garden” about it.
By contrast, Apple’s ecosystem is the canonical example of a walled garden. But it’s overwhelmingly programmed in unsafe languages (C, C++, and Objective-C). So what gives?
> It's not hard to see where things are going if you read between the lines. Increasingly, "safety and security" is being used to exert control over the population and destroy freedom
This is an eye-poppingly confusing confabulation: in what world am I any less free because the programs I write and use have fewer trivial vulnerabilities in them? What freedom, exactly, have I lost by choosing to crash less?
You bring up the GNU project; their background is explicitly rooted in Lisp: one of the very first safe, managed languages. The unsafety and comparative messiness of C is one of their standard bugbears. That hasn’t stopped their message of political and software freedom, as you’ve pointed out.