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modern 64-bit cpus (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 27.02.2020, 12:13

> > GPC was mostly paid work, so I think the main developer (and other dude)
> > were only interested in getting paid. (Not to sound cynical, but I think
> > that's fair.)
>
> IMHO not fair. They worked on it voluntarily while they also used it at
> work. And they deserve credit for that volunteer work.
Not a criticism, just an observation. One developer quoted an hourly wage to rewrite, and one user donated a noticeable amount of cash. That was in later years, when things were already stagnant. But it was still never integrated properly into GCC because they couldn't maintain their work in-tree (for whatever reason) and couldn't deal with the various backend bugs nor the tedious kludges needed to work in C (apparently).

I don't know, honestly. It was a cool compiler with good dialect support, but it just was too brittle, I suppose. (I had it installed [DJGPP version, of course] on XP in 2005 before I even knew what to do with it.)

N.B. "m o n e y" is a dirty word, according to this forum software, literally.

> > I did see one guy from .nl (SARC?) "privately" migrated from
> > Extended Pascal (Prospero, not GPC) to D. I don't really blame him,
> > I know it can get complicated, but his attempts to use FPC and Ada
> > didn't pan out
>
> Strange post, his demands are weird, and many have no or few details.
> Comparing GCed to non GC languages is IMHO apples and oranges anyway, and
> it heavily depends on intended application.
He seemed to have his reasons. I don't second-guess him too badly. Still, you would think that FPC or Ada would at least be halfway home, but maybe not. D seems farther away, but I guess it's not impossibly far.

D can minimize (or "mostly" eliminate) GC usage, AFAIK, and the runtime library has been rewritten to avoid it sometimes. So it's not that bad. Besides, there are different kinds of GC, so they aren't all the same (or slow, buggy). Don't forget that Oberon (usually, but not always) has GC, too. Even Ada was supposedly designed to optionally support it.

> Usually such tradeoffs are driven in the direction the main guy wants
> anyway. It is usaully more about finding justification than to really
> measure the various languages. More importantly, I complete miss other
> aspects than language (libraries, target concerns, IDE, gui etc etc), which
> is another sign it is crafted for a specific audience when the decision
> already had effectively been made.
I don't think he made the decision by himself. Rather, it seems he consulted with the company hierarchy itself first.

> In my case D being GCed would earn a -50. Useless.

Lua also has GC, but it's written in C. Mark and sweep?? I dunno, but it varies by implementation. However, you do have a point. I remember reading that Modula-3's [sic] biggest portability problem was its GC, by far. (You know, FreeBSD's cvsup was written in it, I think.)

GC is not perfect by any means, and I don't know enough to even pretend to advocate for it. But it's not (necessarily) the end of the world either.

> > Oh, BTW, GM2 (ISO 10514, ISO Modula-2 atop GCC) also works with nested
> > procedures (and C++-compatible exceptions, your Delphi favorite
> feature),
>
> Don't understand. Do you mean SEH?
I just meant that ISO added exceptions, unlike PIM. And exceptions are something that Delphi has that Turbo didn't. That's all. (You know, even C++ didn't have exceptions until much later, IIRC roughly AT&T 3.0 [1990??].)

> > though I've barely tested it (years ago). Similarly, it probably will
> > get merged one day. I always check this one
> > blog from time to time.
>
> Browsed through it. Mostly same content as 2003. See that the M2 R10 stuff
> is also dead. (not that sad about it, IMHO it was a bit too baroque)
R10 just simplified a bit, made it more Oberon-like (type extension, no variant records, IIRC). Let's be honest, ISO Modula-2 itself is a bit baroque, which is why many prefer PIM or Oberon (which is very non-standard, esp. for simple things like files or paramcount/paramstr that TP and C have by default). That makes little sense, why would people prefer non-standard? But they do. Still, I like Oberon a lot, but implementations vary quite a bit. (Standardization itself is overkill sometimes or too weak or unpopular, so I don't blame them for not wasting their time. C# is standard, but Java is not. Look at BASIC, its standards are heavily ignored, worse than Pascal, even!)

Long story short, I'm still sympathetic to ISO Modula-2 and Oberon-07 and whatever else (FPC/TP, of course). But it's like a weird halfway between two sides, even though neither will win.

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