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It's a pity Modula-2 did not gain wider adoption 30 years ago - it has almost all the memory safety of managed languages and none of the performance penalties.
by DenisM 8y ago
It's a pity Modula-2 did not gain wider adoption 30 years ago - it has almost all the memory safety of managed languages and none of the performance penalties. Array bounds were checked by compiler and the only available unsafe operation was deallocate, all other unsafe operations were sequestered into separate module which could be easily isolated, audited, and/or banned as appropriate. Life could have been so much better.
- arcticbull 8y agoLuckily now we have Rust! :)
- DenisM 8y ago30 years of pain tho? Plus however many more years it will take to phase out existing C-based code, so another 30 at least.
- arcticbull 8y agoI think Ada was type-safe too, agreed re: 30 misspent years, and here's hoping it doesn't take 30 more to get where we need to be.
- phkahler 8y agoLook to the future and try to build it on the lessons of the past. Dont worry about the missed opportunities, if anyone knew in advance C and C++ would not have been used the way they were.
- lewisinc 8y agoIt depends how it gets prioritized by the companies that own and contribute to these codebases - both open and private source. Right now there's not much incentive financially to migrate away from any of the existing code, so more often than not it will not happen. One reason why we're seeing stuff like the [FirecrackerVM](https://firecracker-microvm.github.io https://firecracker-microvm.github.io) or [AzureIoTEdge](https://github.com/Azure/iotedge https://github.com/Azure/iotedge) is that the companies behind them know they will attract privacy-/security-minded customers they might not otherwise have. There's other reasons as well, but this is just what stands out to me first.
- agumonkey 8y agothe more you read about history the more you feel that 30years is nothing but required time for reactions to occur