Re: What about Embedded?

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Don, 2006-07-20 at 23:24 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> I totally agree but wouldn't it be better to use native languages that 
> offer all this like the D language (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/).
> 
> No one has ever justified why we need a VM given all its disadvantages 
> (speed - especially when mixing with native code, startup time, resource 
> usage, bloat etc)
> 
> Also managed languages can still leak and crash and misbehave if the 
> p/invoke is not done properly so it aint a silver bullet.
> 
> The D language offers the best of all worlds IMO *without* compromising 
> on speed, resource usage or bloat. It would be madness to use a VM instead!
> 
> (of course its not as integrated into Gnome yet and lacks an IDE but if 
> someone puts the work in you will have a killer platform than no VM 
> based platform can match)
> 

You might be interested in looking at Vala http://www.paldo.org/vala/ .
It offers similar advantages as D does but with one major addition: it
has been designed for GNOME (resp. GObject). I assume you can't subclass
D classes from C (via GObject) or other languages, so it's only usable
for applications but not for GNOME libraries. Vala uses the GObject type
system as its native type system and bindings for GTK+ and other GNOME
libraries are only needed at compile-time, not at run-time.

It's not ready for production use yet but it's available for testing now
and with feedback [hint ;) ] from interested developers I believe that
we can get a very nice development environment for GNOME ready in
relatively short time.

Regards,

Jürg