From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b307bd75c8071241 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: newbie Q: storage management Date: 1997/05/04 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 239280842 References: <5k5hif$7r5@bcrkh13.bnr.ca> <336754A0.41C6@magellan.bgm.link.com> <336A065B.41C6@magellan.bgm.link.com> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-05-04T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Jon asks <> I was talking about languages that are in wide use. Obviously there are examples of general GC in languages of this class that precede Eiffel by a long time. The most obvious example is Algol-68 (note the date that is now 30 years ago!), which was widely used in England (the RRE implementation on ICL machines was viable and used for many real applications), but still I would not consider Algol-68, or Eiffel, or Modula-3 to be languages that have achieved mainstream status. Probably the most interesting thing about Java as a language (perhaps the only really interesting thing from a language point of view), is its commitment to garbage collection. But despite the Sun-induced hype, we cannot consider Java to be mainstream yet (as far as I know, there is not one single major Java application on the market -- Corel is the nearest I know of, but the disastrously inefficient beta that is available is hardly convincing). Still in terms of perception (a tribute to the effectiveness of the Sun PR machine) Java already is mainstream. I think that if and when we have real Java compilers (GC is always easier in safe interpretors) and when we have major Java applications which demonstrate satsifactory performance, then GC will have arrived at a new level of acceptance. Going back to Eiffel. Yes, I agree that from a technical point of view, the point is also made by Eiffel. If we had extensive examples of the use of Eiffel for low level systems applications involving lots of low level interfacing stuff, then this would also be convincing, but right now, Eiffel does not show up on the radar screen of widely used languages (see for example the survey posted by JPR recently, and also the survey quoted recently by Bill Gates for PC development -- it is interesting to note that Java does not appear in the JPR survey, but does in the Gates survey -- at 9%, although Bill is quite skeptical as to whether this number is real or not, since he guesses that most users of Java on the PC are still experimenting and fiddling and not really doing major development (the major development language on the PC is of course Visual Basic, which owns well over half the market).