RFC in Comparison between Rust, D and Go

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 11/13/2015 10:31 PM, Sergey Korshunoff via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 2015-11-11 15:19 GMT+03:00, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
>> I've looked into generating C code as an output format. I found the problems to
>> be endemic and working around them was harder than just generating native
>> code:
>>
>> 1. You're at the mercy of bugs in the C compiler you cannot fix.
>> 2. C leaves quite a lot as "implementation defined", causing endless compatibility issues with >  various C compilers.
>> 3. C's integral promotion rules.
>> 4. Generating exception handling code for C is miserable and inefficient.
>> 5. Your compiler is going to be slower than C.
>> 6. You'll suffer from endless bug reports caused by a mismatch between your
> ....
> All this problems are not fatal.

True, it just makes things a lot harder.

> There is plenty of the "X" to C
> translators, even C++.

I'm familiar with cfront from the 80's, and it definitely negatively influenced 
me on generating C code. Zortech C++ was the first native C++ compiler, and it 
compiled 4x faster than cfront. cfront was never able to handle "near" and 
"far". Exception handling didn't exist at the time, but cfront never survived as 
a viable translator after EH appeared. And, in fact, native compilers completely 
destroyed the viability of cfront.

> Most interesting for me is Vala. And generated
> by Vala C code looks nice. Your point of view is a point of the
> translator writer. From the user point having a C generated code drops
> all needs to descripe how this or thats is implemented by translator,
> a more portable code because a C compilers are written for everything
> (8051 for example), chance quickly replace and compare different C
> compilers and interpreters as backends, chance to use different C
> tools  to transform and analyze a code, etc....

That's all fine until you, as translator writer, have to deal with some stupid 
bug in version X.XX of a C compiler you never heard of used by an important 
customer of yours.


> PS: you just say that C is not suitable for the system programming

No, that is an entirely different statement.