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Well, if you want to talk about "hardcore compiler guys", I'd say that Google has the advantage since e.g. Ken Thompson and Rob Pike have chosen to work there a

by jbarham 16y ago

Well, if you want to talk about "hardcore compiler guys", I'd say that Google has the advantage since e.g. Ken Thompson and Rob Pike have chosen to work there and not at Apple. They are on the team that's developing Go and the pace of improvement is pretty remarkable. Rob Pike et al also developed Sawzall, a massively parallel data analysis language that's been in use in production at Google for several years. Google also developed a custom register based Java VM for Android. And they have a Java to JavaScript (!) compiler for Google Web Toolkit. Microsoft is doing more interesting work than Apple in developing production ready languages with e.g. Haskell (Simon Peyton-Jones is an MS researcher), .Net/C#, F#, IronPython. But unfortunately for MS they are tied to the albatross of Windows... LLVM/Clang might look impressive but AFAIK not even Apple is using it to ship production code. Proof of concept implementations are one thing, production quality shipping code is another.

Zev 16y ago
LLVM/Clang might look impressive but AFAIK not even Apple is using it to ship production code. Now, see, thats just plain wrong. Apple ships some pretty big products that are built with clang/llvm: Xcode, OpenGL and OpenCL to name a few. And I wouldn't be surprised if parts of iPhone OS4 are built with it, due to [REDACTED due to the NDA]. Plus, you know, MacRuby. Which is built with LLVM and just as fascinating as IronPython is, in terms of integration with a preexisting environment (only the Cocoa/ObjC runtime instead of .NET runtime). And the few people working on that (some of which are Apple employees) are pretty damn smart as well. Well, if you want to talk about "hardcore compiler guys"... I'm also going to have to disagree with you on this. Chris Lattner and the rest of the people working on LLVM at Apple are pretty damned smart (and serious) about what they're working on. They might not have as large of a neckbeard as Ken Thompson does, but, that doesn't mean that they should be ignored outright.

by jbarham 16y ago

Zev 16y ago

LLVM/Clang might look impressive but AFAIK not even Apple is using it to ship production code. Now, see, thats just plain wrong. Apple ships some pretty big products that are built with clang/llvm: Xcode, OpenGL and OpenCL to name a few. And I wouldn't be surprised if parts of iPhone OS4 are built with it, due to [REDACTED due to the NDA]. Plus, you know, MacRuby. Which is built with LLVM and just as fascinating as IronPython is, in terms of integration with a preexisting environment (only the Cocoa/ObjC runtime instead of .NET runtime). And the few people working on that (some of which are Apple employees) are pretty damn smart as well. Well, if you want to talk about "hardcore compiler guys"... I'm also going to have to disagree with you on this. Chris Lattner and the rest of the people working on LLVM at Apple are pretty damned smart (and serious) about what they're working on. They might not have as large of a neckbeard as Ken Thompson does, but, that doesn't mean that they should be ignored outright.