News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why are most browsers developed in C++?. Parent comment

Re:Why are most browsers developed in C++? by bitwize on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @03:59PM (#6136455)
There's C. There's Ada. There's Object Pascal. There's Objective-C. If you're a GNOMEhead, Vala can be pressed into service.

I seriously think that anyone who finds themselves reaching for C++ to solve a task should try Ada instead. The semantics of their code will be clearer and their code will be more readable, therefore maintainable.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why are most browsers developed in C++? by kintamanimatt on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @05:04PM (#6136828)
I didn't downvote you, but, oh holy crap, Ada! Free documentation is non-existent, performance is lacking compared to C++ [-1] (yeah, yeah, benchmarks, etc), the community is minuscule and pretty much limited to stuff like critical real time systems (read: avionics), and the price of the books (the complete, current ones) is a barrier to entry.[0] From what I've read of others' experiences, there aren't many happy Ada developers. This isn't exactly conducive to a successful FOSS project! (On a side note, I do mostly like the language's syntax and its influence on Ruby is very obvious.)

I'm not sure anybody would use Objective-C if it weren't for Apple, any more than people would choose to use JavaScript if it weren't for it being the only language available in the browser.

It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but the one thing you really need for a successful OSS project are developers. Do any of the Object Pascal implementations actually have a community?

A codebase as large as a browser written in C would be a horrible, unmaintainable mess IHMO.

[-1] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/ada.php

[0] http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3D...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why are most browsers developed in C++? by bitwize on Thursday August 01, 2013 @11:38AM (#6141027)
The Ada community is actually growing. Ada has a bad rap because back in the day Ada was a DoD requirement, which meant that vendors could ship compilers that conformed to the spec, but otherwise sucked rocks. With the advent of GNAT it's no longer the case that your compiler is bound to suck. I learned Ada primarily with the help of free resources. The ARM is also free.

Granted, the sort of person who is likely to use Ada is not a l33t hax0r, but someone who's been around the block a few times on major engineering projects. Still, GNAT has bindings to the likes of Gtk and OpenGL, a direct result of increasing interest in Ada outside of critical systems engineering.

It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but the one thing you really need for a successful OSS project are developers. Do any of the Object Pascal implementations actually have a community?

FreePascal/Lazarus does. It's mainly Europeans (French and Germans primarily) who once did PC development with Turbo Pascal.

I'm not sure anybody would use Objective-C if it weren't for Apple, any more than people would choose to use JavaScript if it weren't for it being the only language available in the browser.

I would (and do). Its Smalltalk-based object system is much easier to wrangle than C++'s.

A codebase as large as a browser written in C would be a horrible, unmaintainable mess IHMO.

Yes, point against C. C++ has the advantage that it can turn even small codebases into horrible, unmaintainable messes. :) This is the reason why I converted an entire game engine to Objective-C.

[ Parent | on HN ]