5 ms·

This already exists, but it isn't trendy. It's FreePascal. Nobody believes me, but we have perfection already. No crap you don't need. No crazy corner cases. N

This already exists, but it isn't trendy. It's FreePascal. Nobody believes me, but we have perfection already. No crap you don't need. No crazy corner cases. No C++ templated metaprogramming lambda auto pointer garbage. No "I can't write a linked list without a Grimoire" Rust. It's great. You get a ton done, and simply ignore the language wars. No VM trash (Java). No web trash (JavaScript/"Webasm"). No crap. Try all the others, and try FreePascal. It's old enough that people aren't bolting on stupid shit. The community is awesome. Everybody just gets shit done. There's a lot of art if you go looking, but none of it requires a kilopage book to describe.

pjmlp 7y ago
As much as I like Pascal, and I am a big fan since Turbo Pascal since version 4 for MS-DOS, using all of them until about Delphi 3, lack of some kind of automatic memory management is a killer for anyone that cares about code security. Delphi only supports it for COM and Objective-c/Swift interoperability, everything else is as manual as TP for MS-DOS, and I bet FP hasn't improved in that regard.
- ckok 7y ago
  RemObjects Oxygene does. All targets have a GC (boehm on win32,64, Linux and Darwin, .net and java have their own of course) or arc (cocoa).
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Thanks for the heads up. However that isn't Free Pascal, which was the OP's point. Having said that, RemObjects Oxygene is probably an alternative then. :)
    - ckok 7y ago
      Yep. It is Pascal though. That's why I mentioned it
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Ah, a young lad :) I started tinkering with Turbo Pascal 3 and even have some experience with Pascal on the Apple II. (Not because I am THAT old, but that were the only computers my school had at the end of the 80ies) The successors of Pascal are also highly interesting. I used Modula-2 quite a lot, but never got deep into Oberon. I do think one big advantage of Go is, that it so strongly draws on the Wirth languages that it almost can be considered a modern successor. And I fully agree, one shouldn't use a language these days for general programming without some kind of automatic memory management. Which is the other aspect which drew me towards Go, a nice nativley compiled language with a GC.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Yeah, quite young indeed. :) I was initially also drawn into Go, mainly due to its Oberon-2 influence as well. Even did a couple of contribution attempts during pre-v1 days , but they weren't that good anyway. However back in the Oberon days, what I liked was the evolution that followed suit, Oberon-2, Component Pascal, Active Oberon and finally Zonnon. As such, I never appreciated the minimalism discussions around Go and not having modern language features. For that we already have Wirth cutting down Oberon features in every Oberon-07 language specification document revision. Still, I do look forward for some Go 2.0 roadmap items to actually land in Go, and advocate for its use in applications that would be otherwise written in C, if Go wasn't a thing. And I also collect examples of actual systems work done in Go, regardless of it not being suitable in the opinions of anti-GC crowd.
    - _ph_ 7y ago
      Honestly, I am quite happy with the role of Go as a better C. A lot of applications still get written in C because C++ isn't making things better. And Go has a lot of higher level constructs than C, so it reaches into much further domains than C. Structs with methods and struct inheritance as well as interfaces give a surprising amount of power. Also, having first class functions and closures gives a ton of power C (and even C++) lack. Add to that the great GC, and there are surprisingly few tasks I consider Go unfit for. I am certainly watching the work on Go 2.0, it is certainly worth to continue working on enhancing the language, but I am very happy how carefully it is done as adding too much complexity to the language would be detrimental. There are only a very few things I miss generics for and usually they can be worked around. I might have to add the disclaimer, that my paying job is mainly about programming in Lisp, so for me there is a high-level alternative to Go, but this also shows me how Go is a great solution for a lot of problems.
fit2rule 7y ago
I think you meant Lua. But otherwise, I completely agree with you.
mhd 7y ago
I'm a big fan of the Wirthian language family, and while I think FP is eminently usable, I still think Modula-3 would be a better fit for Gophers. A M3 frontend for FPC would be a great combination...
- pjmlp 7y ago
  A few devs kept developing CM3 and they are also experimenting with a LLVM backend. https://github.com/modula3/cm3 https://github.com/modula3/cm3
twic 7y ago
Please don't troll here thanks.

pjmlp 7y ago

As much as I like Pascal, and I am a big fan since Turbo Pascal since version 4 for MS-DOS, using all of them until about Delphi 3, lack of some kind of automatic memory management is a killer for anyone that cares about code security. Delphi only supports it for COM and Objective-c/Swift interoperability, everything else is as manual as TP for MS-DOS, and I bet FP hasn't improved in that regard.

ckok 7y ago
RemObjects Oxygene does. All targets have a GC (boehm on win32,64, Linux and Darwin, .net and java have their own of course) or arc (cocoa).
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. However that isn't Free Pascal, which was the OP's point. Having said that, RemObjects Oxygene is probably an alternative then. :)
  - ckok 7y ago
    Yep. It is Pascal though. That's why I mentioned it
_ph_ 7y ago
Ah, a young lad :) I started tinkering with Turbo Pascal 3 and even have some experience with Pascal on the Apple II. (Not because I am THAT old, but that were the only computers my school had at the end of the 80ies) The successors of Pascal are also highly interesting. I used Modula-2 quite a lot, but never got deep into Oberon. I do think one big advantage of Go is, that it so strongly draws on the Wirth languages that it almost can be considered a modern successor. And I fully agree, one shouldn't use a language these days for general programming without some kind of automatic memory management. Which is the other aspect which drew me towards Go, a nice nativley compiled language with a GC.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Yeah, quite young indeed. :) I was initially also drawn into Go, mainly due to its Oberon-2 influence as well. Even did a couple of contribution attempts during pre-v1 days , but they weren't that good anyway. However back in the Oberon days, what I liked was the evolution that followed suit, Oberon-2, Component Pascal, Active Oberon and finally Zonnon. As such, I never appreciated the minimalism discussions around Go and not having modern language features. For that we already have Wirth cutting down Oberon features in every Oberon-07 language specification document revision. Still, I do look forward for some Go 2.0 roadmap items to actually land in Go, and advocate for its use in applications that would be otherwise written in C, if Go wasn't a thing. And I also collect examples of actual systems work done in Go, regardless of it not being suitable in the opinions of anti-GC crowd.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    Honestly, I am quite happy with the role of Go as a better C. A lot of applications still get written in C because C++ isn't making things better. And Go has a lot of higher level constructs than C, so it reaches into much further domains than C. Structs with methods and struct inheritance as well as interfaces give a surprising amount of power. Also, having first class functions and closures gives a ton of power C (and even C++) lack. Add to that the great GC, and there are surprisingly few tasks I consider Go unfit for. I am certainly watching the work on Go 2.0, it is certainly worth to continue working on enhancing the language, but I am very happy how carefully it is done as adding too much complexity to the language would be detrimental. There are only a very few things I miss generics for and usually they can be worked around. I might have to add the disclaimer, that my paying job is mainly about programming in Lisp, so for me there is a high-level alternative to Go, but this also shows me how Go is a great solution for a lot of problems.

fit2rule 7y ago

I think you meant Lua. But otherwise, I completely agree with you.

mhd 7y ago

I'm a big fan of the Wirthian language family, and while I think FP is eminently usable, I still think Modula-3 would be a better fit for Gophers. A M3 frontend for FPC would be a great combination...

pjmlp 7y ago
A few devs kept developing CM3 and they are also experimenting with a LLVM backend. https://github.com/modula3/cm3 https://github.com/modula3/cm3

twic 7y ago

Please don't troll here thanks.