Re:Rust: A Critical Retrospective
by ModernMech on Friday May 20, 2022 @09:16PM
(#31454413)
Sure, but that's not really imperative programming. That's imperative programs finding their correct niche. It's a shift in perspective. Today we do imperative programming with a little distributed/async/parallel/concurrent programming sprinkled in. In the future distributed/async etc. will be the default with a little imperative programming sprinkled in.
Even languages with 'exotic' execution semantics like prolog's Unification is actually implemented with an imperative interpeter like the Warren Abstract Machine/WAM, and there's not an obvious path to implementing such unorthodox semantics directly in hardware. Low-level imperative programs aren't going away, they're just being isolated into small kernels and we're building higher level abstractions on top of them.