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programming language comparison (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 03.03.2020, 23:02

> As said I never really saw a practical use case for it. I considered it
> without any compromises to make it usable, and the basic dialect too
> limited and tied to its own little OS world.

If Oberon was exclusively tied to OberonOS, then that wouldn't be ideal. But there are many hosted compilers for other OSes, obviously, even DOS! There are many improved dialects, as I mentioned, so that's not totally restricting anyone either.

Don't forget that Extended Pascal was a strict superset of classic ISO Pascal, same as Objective C was originally a strict superset of C. (Modula-3 doesn't really fully inherit from Modula-2 but instead went a bit wayward. Actually, I think it was an improved Modula-2+ from third-parties. Still interesting.)

> > Hey, even your beloved ACK had ISO Pascal and PIM Modula-2 support
>
> MY beloved ACK? I don't think I have seen it running this century
> :-)
I was half-joking, but it's still a fairly decent compiler. The last official prerelease was 2016 (with tons of minor changes in trunk since), maintained as a hobby by David Given, and it (mostly) works. I built it atop Linux and used it a bit in recent years. It's had quite some cleanups since the original releases, to say the least. It's no full replacement for GCC, of course, but it works.

Historically, it's tied to Minix, formerly being the system compiler. I had some minor fascination with Minix 2 (you know, DOSMinix ran atop DOS and FAT16) in years past. 2.0.2 was 1998 (last to run on XT?) and 2.04 (2003) was a quick cleanup to prepare for Minix 3 (2005+). So the v2 series is a bit dated (like DOS) but always impressed me with how much it could do. Minix 3 added and changed a whole heck of a lot, especially later releases, but I never fully delved into any of it because I was too green. Being BSD-licensed since 2000 was cool, and I considered it like a "lite" Linux (old POSIX compatible), aka "minimal *nix"! Too old and limited for most people, but I found it quite nice for what it did.

> > > > > In my case D being GCed would earn a -50. Useless.
> > > >
> > > > Lua also has GC, but it's written in C.
> > >
> > > Yeah, so no Lua for me. Point?
> >
> > C is considered a baseline of useful,
>
> Not by me. It's core feature is compiler availability, and that is not a
> language feature, but a popularity contest. C is maybe a good example of a
> language that became production to early, cutting out time to mature and at
> least ban the worst things.
C has some warts, but overall it's fairly good and works. Same with Pascal. You could maybe say it tries to do too much, even. It's just very hard to be functional, clean, and compatible. Some things are easier than others. It's not perfect, but it's still workable. "Where there's a will, there's a way." Pessimists who only see negatives will never even try to solve the obvious problems. Optimists make do with what they have. "A poor carpenter blames his tools!"

Anything that works is good. Anything that works cleanly and efficiently is better. But a portable solution is best because a localized solution that nobody else can use is almost worthless.

> > and a GC-enabled language written in portable C is probably
> > not considered broken. But I guess your needs are different.
>
> I don't really see that logic. At all. What does C implementation language
> to do with the usability of the result? Probably the C malloc also ties
> into the GC thus is halted by the global lock as well. Maybe the threads
> are even suspended to enable stack inspection.
Lua is portable, by design, so yeah, it's probably limited. Like I said, I heard that Modula-3's biggest portability problem, by far, was its garbage collector. That alone makes me wary of things like that. Extra features are great, but when tied too closely to an OS (or cpu or compiler or even dialect) that it restricts portability and future work (since modern computing is chaos and everything is frequently upheaved), it makes me a bit disillusioned. Slow or limited is better than broken or unportable/rare/proprietary.

> (GM2)
> I know it exists, but never dug deep into it, other than some reading on
> the website. And I have an allergy of GCC mods after GPC.
But is either useful for your production needs? Do either GM2 or GPC come close to doing what Delphi does for you? And if not, why not?

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