Ideally less? We should have adopted zero tolerance years ago. Letting end users' machines be pwned to save 1 ns not checking for a buffer overrun is absurdly bad engineering.
We can afford it in 2012(in most areas of computing at least). We couldn't in 70's. Imagine scanning through an array with thousands of elements and trying to make it happen real-time with weak hardware. Suddenly that 1 ns grows to 1 second. No can do. Lots of infrastructure is built atop of C, which would need to be rebuilt with something new, supposedly better. Who is up to the task, with what motivation and agenda?
What would be the desired language we have today to replace C with? C++? D? Go? Rust? Quite frankly I would place my bet for Rust, and even it(right now) relies on LLVM.
It is horribly hard task to provide truly stable and reliable abstractions. C is one of those which has succeeded, despite the problems with it. It is even harder to try to replace such a well-established layer of abstraction.
Right you are. I am not at all arguing for using any of those languages. I too think automatic buffer overrun checking is the sort of thing a true C replacement should not have.
Nor should it have _even more_ idiosyncrasies like C++ or automatic memory management or even a runtime (so no rust).
You bring to light the painful question, who is going to do it? Language designers are far too keen on fancy features. All C replacements that have been suggested in the past decade, Java, Go, Rust, Vala, rely on runtimes that take away true control in trade for features like typesafety, memory management and security.
The person who is going to be the creator of the next C has to be a hero in an epic tale, first he should grow up with clean comfortable languages like C#, Ruby or Haskell, but then dark times will force uncomfortable languages like C and C++ on him. But the rough times will make him stronger, and in the end he will slay the dragon with a tool that unifies his love of comfort with the cold pragmatic of bare metal code.
You might want to look at the languages ATS, deca, BitC, and Clay, if you haven't already. Yes, I've been keeping a list, but I haven't looked at all of them in depth recently.
Edit: just discovered Tart. Can't tell if it requires a runtime.
Deca has been... delayed by my continually having to revise its goddamned type system. Maybe if ECOOP says yes to me in February... or at least sends a rejection notice in which the reviews don't point out some unsoundness issue.
If you know a type theorist who could check over my paper without any obligations to the ECOOP programming committee so I could finally have someone confirm that this algorithm isn't Doomed To Failure, that would be incredibly helpful.
Also, if you could come up with any neat ideas on the following matter, that would be great.
Thanks, a fun new OS to look at too. I don't know any type theorists, and I'm afraid I'm not much of one myself (yet). I'm mostly just looking forward to something DRYer and safer than C for low-level programming. I'll do my best to grok the type class versus multimethod thing. That seems to be within reach.
I'll do my best to grok the type class versus multimethod thing. That seems to be within reach.
Thanks, actually. My brain one-tracks itself too often to handle everything.
In the meanwhile, I'm taking a look at the paper below, "Integrating Nominal and Structural Subtyping". If its type-system works the way I intuit it does, I might be able to tear out both existential types and sum types from Deca and replace them with something more familiarly object-oriented-looking. The bit-level implementation would work a lot like Deca's current existentials and extensible sum types, but the syntax would transform to become more Scala-like (I really like Scala) and I could substitute class extension for existential packaging.
Hmmm... If you think of all parameter lists as tuples with some anonymous type, [un]packed transparently like Python parameter lists, then a multimethod defines a type class with one method (itself), the set of parameter lists to which it can be applied. So it would seem that multimethods can be a special case of type classes. That's the best I can do right now, assuming I've understood all the terms. Maybe you can do more with it.
Figuring out what type classes have to do with implicit parameters will take more than one afternoon of reading. It seems I can't read the other paper because I'm not an ACM member. But I guess Deca is going to be delayed again? :)
