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I'm well aware of many of the above systems. You may have missed the part where I specified "mass-market" though, right at the start. Perhaps you weren't paying

I'm well aware of many of the above systems. You may have missed the part where I specified "mass-market" though, right at the start. Perhaps you weren't paying attention. UNIX itself predates POSIX by a large margin and early versions were written in assembly, not C. I'm talking about the bulk of modern commodity desktop and web application development, which is really the lion's share of modern software development. This overwhelmingly occurs on and for workstations running Linux/Windows/BSD, all derived from C, with large parts of the userland still written in C code, or in languages which were bootstrapped from C, depend on C, or depend on a thin language-specific wrappers around existing C libraries. Many if not most of the popular languages supported by LLVM have a frontend written in C/C++. Sure these languages can become self-hosted, eg. Rust (albeit dependent on LLVM, written in C/C++), or Golang. But I posit that until large parts of these systems (kernel _and_ userland) and the extensive collection of C libraries which are used for application development today are rewritten or replaced, you will not see the huge paradigm shift in commodity application development you are describing. I think it's going to take longer than that. I am not as optimistic as you. Stakeholders, programmers and product managers alike tend to favour the path of least resistance. C is the lingua franca of these existing systems, and forms the common basis around which multiple higher-level languages currently wrap and leverage. Which new common denominator is going to take its place? LLVM bytecode? Are we going to rewrite libz/libpng in each new language-of-the-week instead? This is even before getting into embedded, where C is still king, C++ is really only starting to become more popular over the last 10 years or so, and Rust is barely a blip on the radar. Linux's popularity growth in this area is phenomenal, unmatched by any other as well.

pjmlp 8y ago
On IBM and Unisys mainframes the common denominator is the "language environment", the intermediate format that has allowed them to evolve all these years since the 60's. On Windows the common denominator are COM and .NET, with COM upgraded to UWP on recent versions. On Android the common denominator is Dalvik bytecode. On macOS/iOS the common denominator could be indeed LLVM bitcode, depending on how much Apple would like to deviate from upstream to make their own toolchain actually hardware independent. Natural Linux's popularity has sky rocketed, UNIX's path to success and its clones, has always been free beer, which tastes even better when it comes with source code. I am optimistic, but I am also aware it won't happen on my lifetime, changing mentalities requires changing generations, one person at a time.
- nineteen999 8y ago
  Z/OS is written in, amongst other things, in C/C++. .NET is implemented in C/C++. Dalvik is written in C. And the specification allows for calling into unmanaged code via JNI, mostly for performance reasons. LLVM is written in C/C++. Windows, MacOS, Android/Linux kernels are all written in C. The Swift, Rust, Objective-C communities et al should put their money where their mouth is after all these years, and provide feasible replacements for just _one_ of these consumer systems. Otherwise it comes off at worst as grandstanding, at best, navel gazing. Where is the consumer ready Rust replacement for LLVM? Where is the consumer ready Obj-C replacement for Dalvik? Where is the consumer ready operating system kernel based on .NET? Where is the consumer ready Swift library of high performance video codecs? These languages need some sort of flagship IMHO if they are ever to displace C/C++. Developer mindshare is important to getting critical mass and these languages are fighting each other for it, while C/C++ is still sort of sitting by eating their lunch and getting shit done.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    First of all, there is no such language as C/C++. C++ although tainted by copy-paste compatibility with C89, does offer the language features for security conscious developers to make use of, and C++17 is quite a pleasure to use. C on the other hand could be nuked for what I care, it has been clear since 1979 that security and C would never go together. Now regarding your assertions. z/OS was initially written in a mix of Assembly and PL/I. C and C++ came later into the picture as the system got a POSIX personality. The way to write libraries exposed to all languages available on z/OS is via the z/OS Language Environment. Chapter 9.12 of z/OS Basics, https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246366.pdf https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246366.pdf .NET has hardly any pure C code, rather C++. Even so, the C# and VB.NET compilers have been bootstrapped thanks to Rosylin and now C++ is gone from the compiler side. F# was bootstrapped from the early days. Since Roslyn came into production, the .NET team started planning moving parts of the runtime from C++ to C#. "So, in my view, the primary trend is moving our existing C++ codebase to C#. It makes us so much more efficient and enables a broader set of .NET developers to reason about the base platform more easily and also contribute." https://www.infoq.com/articles/virtual-panel-dotnet-future https://www.infoq.com/articles/virtual-panel-dotnet-future Also the first version of .NET's GC was actually prototyped in Common Lisp, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/patrick_dussud/2006/11/21/how-it-all-startedaka-the-birth-of-the-clr/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/patrick_dussud/2006/11/21/h... Unity introduced HPC# at GDC 2018 and they are now in the process of migrating C++ engine code into HPC#. Both the requirements of HPC# as C# subset for performance critical code, as the experience with Singularity and Midori drove the design of C# 7.x features regarding low level GC free data structure management. "Evolving Unity" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFFLEiDr3T0&list=PLX2vGYjWbI0S8ujCJKYT-mIZf7YCuF-Ka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFFLEiDr3T0&list=PLX2vGYjWbI... "Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET" https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programming https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi... "Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k Dalvik was written in C++ and is dead since Android 5.0. ART was written in a mix of Java and C++ between Android 5 and 6 as AOT compiler at installation time. It was rebooted for Android 7, where it is now a mix of an interpreter written in highly optimized Assembly, with JIT/AOT compilers written in a mix of Java and C++, making use of PGO data. On Android Things, userspace device drivers are written in Java. https://developer.android.com/things/sdk/drivers/ https://developer.android.com/things/sdk/drivers/ Sun back in the day toyed with the idea of having Java on the Solaris kernel, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220938922_Writing_Solaris_device_drivers_in_Java https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220938922_Writing_S... And on SunSPOT devices, http://www.sunspotdev.org/ http://www.sunspotdev.org/ Fiji VM and PTC Perc Ultra can be compiled AOT to native code and run Java bare-metal. https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc http://fiji-systems.com/ http://fiji-systems.com/ Oracle is also in the process of following JikesRVM example, and with the help of Graal, bootstrap Java thus reducing the dependency on C++, via the Project Metropolis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMk5KoUIOy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMk5KoUIOy4 Graal, which incidently has better LLVM is written in C++. Yes it does expose a C API, but it also has bindings for other languages. At WWDC 2017, Apple announced that launchd and the dock were rewritten in Swift. I expect other OS components to be announced at this years' WWDC. Windows kernel was written in C. Since Windows 8, C++ is officially supported on the kernel and given the company's stance on usefulness of C, they have been migrating the code to compile as C++. "We do not plan to support ISO C features that are not part of either C90 or ISO C++" https://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-and-c99/ https://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-an... Now Visual C++ has been updated up to C11 library compatibility, as per ISO C++17 compliance requirement, that's all. "We have converted most of the CRT sources to compile as C++, enabling us to replace many ugly C idioms with simpler and more advanced C++ constructs" https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great-c-runtime-crt-refactoring/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great... https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/4oruo1/windows_10_coded_in_c_or_assembler/d4g9we9/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/4oruo1/windows_10_code... Fuchsia's TCP/IP stack, WLAN services, disk management, package manager, update service are written in Go. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-dev/2xuYHcP0Fdc/tKb1PgTXAwAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-dev/2xuYHcP0Fdc... https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/garnet/+/master/go/src https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/garnet/+/master/go/src Genode OS, ARM Mbed OS and Arduino Wiring are written in C++. As I mentioned, change requires replacing generations one person at a time. First lets turn C into the COBOL of systems programming, then we worry about C++ afterwards.

pjmlp 8y ago

On IBM and Unisys mainframes the common denominator is the "language environment", the intermediate format that has allowed them to evolve all these years since the 60's. On Windows the common denominator are COM and .NET, with COM upgraded to UWP on recent versions. On Android the common denominator is Dalvik bytecode. On macOS/iOS the common denominator could be indeed LLVM bitcode, depending on how much Apple would like to deviate from upstream to make their own toolchain actually hardware independent. Natural Linux's popularity has sky rocketed, UNIX's path to success and its clones, has always been free beer, which tastes even better when it comes with source code. I am optimistic, but I am also aware it won't happen on my lifetime, changing mentalities requires changing generations, one person at a time.

nineteen999 8y ago
Z/OS is written in, amongst other things, in C/C++. .NET is implemented in C/C++. Dalvik is written in C. And the specification allows for calling into unmanaged code via JNI, mostly for performance reasons. LLVM is written in C/C++. Windows, MacOS, Android/Linux kernels are all written in C. The Swift, Rust, Objective-C communities et al should put their money where their mouth is after all these years, and provide feasible replacements for just _one_ of these consumer systems. Otherwise it comes off at worst as grandstanding, at best, navel gazing. Where is the consumer ready Rust replacement for LLVM? Where is the consumer ready Obj-C replacement for Dalvik? Where is the consumer ready operating system kernel based on .NET? Where is the consumer ready Swift library of high performance video codecs? These languages need some sort of flagship IMHO if they are ever to displace C/C++. Developer mindshare is important to getting critical mass and these languages are fighting each other for it, while C/C++ is still sort of sitting by eating their lunch and getting shit done.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  First of all, there is no such language as C/C++. C++ although tainted by copy-paste compatibility with C89, does offer the language features for security conscious developers to make use of, and C++17 is quite a pleasure to use. C on the other hand could be nuked for what I care, it has been clear since 1979 that security and C would never go together. Now regarding your assertions. z/OS was initially written in a mix of Assembly and PL/I. C and C++ came later into the picture as the system got a POSIX personality. The way to write libraries exposed to all languages available on z/OS is via the z/OS Language Environment. Chapter 9.12 of z/OS Basics, https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246366.pdf https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246366.pdf .NET has hardly any pure C code, rather C++. Even so, the C# and VB.NET compilers have been bootstrapped thanks to Rosylin and now C++ is gone from the compiler side. F# was bootstrapped from the early days. Since Roslyn came into production, the .NET team started planning moving parts of the runtime from C++ to C#. "So, in my view, the primary trend is moving our existing C++ codebase to C#. It makes us so much more efficient and enables a broader set of .NET developers to reason about the base platform more easily and also contribute." https://www.infoq.com/articles/virtual-panel-dotnet-future https://www.infoq.com/articles/virtual-panel-dotnet-future Also the first version of .NET's GC was actually prototyped in Common Lisp, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/patrick_dussud/2006/11/21/how-it-all-startedaka-the-birth-of-the-clr/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/patrick_dussud/2006/11/21/h... Unity introduced HPC# at GDC 2018 and they are now in the process of migrating C++ engine code into HPC#. Both the requirements of HPC# as C# subset for performance critical code, as the experience with Singularity and Midori drove the design of C# 7.x features regarding low level GC free data structure management. "Evolving Unity" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFFLEiDr3T0&list=PLX2vGYjWbI0S8ujCJKYT-mIZf7YCuF-Ka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFFLEiDr3T0&list=PLX2vGYjWbI... "Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET" https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programming https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi... "Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k Dalvik was written in C++ and is dead since Android 5.0. ART was written in a mix of Java and C++ between Android 5 and 6 as AOT compiler at installation time. It was rebooted for Android 7, where it is now a mix of an interpreter written in highly optimized Assembly, with JIT/AOT compilers written in a mix of Java and C++, making use of PGO data. On Android Things, userspace device drivers are written in Java. https://developer.android.com/things/sdk/drivers/ https://developer.android.com/things/sdk/drivers/ Sun back in the day toyed with the idea of having Java on the Solaris kernel, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220938922_Writing_Solaris_device_drivers_in_Java https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220938922_Writing_S... And on SunSPOT devices, http://www.sunspotdev.org/ http://www.sunspotdev.org/ Fiji VM and PTC Perc Ultra can be compiled AOT to native code and run Java bare-metal. https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc http://fiji-systems.com/ http://fiji-systems.com/ Oracle is also in the process of following JikesRVM example, and with the help of Graal, bootstrap Java thus reducing the dependency on C++, via the Project Metropolis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMk5KoUIOy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMk5KoUIOy4 Graal, which incidently has better LLVM is written in C++. Yes it does expose a C API, but it also has bindings for other languages. At WWDC 2017, Apple announced that launchd and the dock were rewritten in Swift. I expect other OS components to be announced at this years' WWDC. Windows kernel was written in C. Since Windows 8, C++ is officially supported on the kernel and given the company's stance on usefulness of C, they have been migrating the code to compile as C++. "We do not plan to support ISO C features that are not part of either C90 or ISO C++" https://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-and-c99/ https://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-an... Now Visual C++ has been updated up to C11 library compatibility, as per ISO C++17 compliance requirement, that's all. "We have converted most of the CRT sources to compile as C++, enabling us to replace many ugly C idioms with simpler and more advanced C++ constructs" https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great-c-runtime-crt-refactoring/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great... https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/4oruo1/windows_10_coded_in_c_or_assembler/d4g9we9/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/4oruo1/windows_10_code... Fuchsia's TCP/IP stack, WLAN services, disk management, package manager, update service are written in Go. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-dev/2xuYHcP0Fdc/tKb1PgTXAwAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-dev/2xuYHcP0Fdc... https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/garnet/+/master/go/src https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/garnet/+/master/go/src Genode OS, ARM Mbed OS and Arduino Wiring are written in C++. As I mentioned, change requires replacing generations one person at a time. First lets turn C into the COBOL of systems programming, then we worry about C++ afterwards.