Re: Five Years After

[Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>]

On Wednesday, 24 January 2018 19:06:52 UTC, Simon Clubley  wrote:

> >> I'm a  in position to talk, and I know peanuts about Oberon, but can I ask you something... What is "core" for you ? Is tasking part of it ? Full-featured generics ? Support for exceptions or clause representations ? Class-wide programming and interfaces ? Or what do you not feel as essential ?

I based on Oberon, the syntax needs to be massaged to take away the Wirthianisms that are just horrible. i.e. Uppercase keywords, ; or . and being optional or not, begin...end everywhere adding bulk.

> > I rather agree; but if there was a small "core" replacement for C, I think it would have to be (1) representation clauses, (2) tasking, and (3) generics.
> 
> Tasking is a really big problem here - it requires a lot of RTL/OS support.

True, but at least you don't have to mess about with pthreads and not know if something's going to work or not. Having an abstracted tasking mechanism also adds to portability.
 
> The language is great but the compiler situation is absolutely _horrible_.

It's a total mess.
 
> The compilers are only available for a limited number of platforms,

As was pointed out in that reddit thread, just look at the targets supported by Lazarus.

> code written in the freely available Adacore compiler (not FSF compiler)
> is subject to mandatory licencing under the GPL, and the full language
> is so heavy that writing a full Ada compiler from scratch is a massive
> undertaking.

Yup.
 
> There is however a small core in the Ada language that could bring
> benefits elsewhere but without all the overhead of a full blown
> Ada implementation.
> 
> When talking about a C replacement, you need:
> 

I agree with all those points, plus

6) Be able to use multiple backends so it's more portable to other targets, i.e. iOS, Android, Switch, PS4 (all using LLVM).

Luke.