logoalt Hacker News

throwaway17_17yesterday at 3:30 PM1 replyview on HN

What is the proposed replacement for ASM (in particular) and C in the context of the bootstrapping process? Then why lump ELF (unless you don’t mean the executable format) in with the low level language?

Historically, pjmlp has pushed very strongly for languages attempting to take the place of C and C++ at the infrastructure layer can not claim to have supplanted those two until their own compiler and related infrastructure is not dependent on C++ (LLVM in particular). I tend to sympathize with this view, it is really hard to take a language’s claim to have supplanted C++ and be the only fit for use language going forward, but then is dependent on millions of lines of the languages they disparage.

As a counter however, it’s rather difficult to expect a language to overcome thousands of person-years of work on a compiler like LLVM and tens of thousands of person-years on Linux. The newer languages should be able to make an articulate case that throwing away so much work is not a viable approach and just use what exists now but keep the new languages on all greenfield projects.


Replies

steveklabnikyesterday at 4:01 PM

As another counter, Rust has never claimed to have "supplanted" C++. So holding it to that standard is holding it to a non-goal for itself in the first place.

show 2 replies