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If you were building a programming language, would you write it in Java or Rust?
by dana321 11mo ago
If you were building a programming language, would you write it in Java or Rust?
- foldr 11mo agoI'm not personally a fan of Java, but if I was implementing a compiler, I'd pick a language with GC. There's pretty much no downside to a GC in that context, and it gives you more flexibility when working with graph data structures. If 'building a programming language' means writing an interpreter or VM, then I can see the attraction of Rust for that case. But writing interpreters and VMs is like 0.0001% of the programming that gets done in the world.
- childintime 11mo agoGraal and Truffle make the JVM look attractive, especially for this case!
- pjmlp 11mo agoIn those two alone, Java. There is no reason I would care about borrow checking implementing a compiler, and besides all the tooling, Java also has stuff like ANTRLR and MPS, and naturally Graal is a good playground for compiler backend tooling. However in general, I would rather look into OCaml, Haskell, F#, Scala.