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The author's point is weakened by the fact that the Converge VM is now (5 years after this article) written in python: https://github.com/ltratt/converge/search
by akkartik 13y ago
The author's point is weakened by the fact that the Converge VM is now (5 years after this article) written in python: https://github.com/ltratt/converge/search?l=c https://github.com/ltratt/converge/search?l=c (as of https://github.com/ltratt/converge/tree/08dadda29b/vm https://github.com/ltratt/converge/tree/08dadda29b/vm). Compare https://github.com/ltratt/converge/tree/converge-1.x/vm https://github.com/ltratt/converge/tree/converge-1.x/vm.
"there are some obvious reasons as to why it might be so reliable: it's used by (relatively) large numbers of people, who help shake out bugs; the software has been developed over a long period of time, so previous generations bore the brunt of the bugs; and, if we're being brutally honest, only fairly competent programmers tend to use C in the first place. But still, the fundamental question remained: why is so much of the software I use in C so reliable?"
Why could the fundamental question not be explained by all the points he just mentioned?
I'm a C programmer, and this guy is hitting all my biases, but this isn't very well thought-out.
- gabriel 13y agoI believe he explains this switch here: http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast_enough_time http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast... It's a very good read. IIRC, the reasons aren't really rooted in the language that is used. It's more about the tooling provided by PyPy for constructing a compiler.
- masklinn 13y ago> The author's point is weakened by the fact that the Converge VM is now (5 years after this article) written in python Kinda, it's written in RPython, a restricted and statically inferable subset of python built specifically to write VMs.