Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3?

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

learn2code@yourdesk.com wrote:
> I would hate to see the "major production-code system" that relied on GC.
> I can tell you this with certainty, no bank, insurance company, airline,
> or any other online realtime operation uses such nonsense. Of course they
> have some bits here and there written in C++ but the code that keeps them
> online and serving customers is written in COBOL, assembler or Ada and
> doesn't need or have GC. That's production.

That has not been true for decades. Here is a trivial counter example of
Jane St. Capital using OCaml in the finance industry:

  http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61

My company specializes in the use of OCaml and F# for high performance
technical computing including scientific computing and finance. These
garbage collected languages are common there precisely because they make it
easy to implement complicated algorithms and data structures very
efficiently.

For example, I recently implemented QR decomposition via Householder
reductions in F# that was generic over the element type. I wrote it for fun
but it turned out to be 3x faster than the Intel MKL and 35x shorter than
the reference implementation in LAPACK.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u