Re: [Algorithms] Complexity of new hardware

[Philip T. <ex...@gm...>]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 5:24 AM, Jon Watte <jw...@gm...> wrote:
> So, how to design a well-adopted, robust, small, powerful language with
> pretty syntax and an effective C integration layer? And what language
> has all that but I've missed? :-)

There's JavaScript, which has pretty huge adoption (outside of games),
C-like syntax, closures, prototype-based inheritance, active
communities working on the language spec and on implementations and on
applications, is reasonably elegant and powerful (see some articles on
http://www.crockford.com/javascript/), is quite small (the language
itself, distinct from the web browser environment (with DOM and AJAX
and all that stuff) it typically runs in), and is designed to be
embedded into another application and to execute untrusted (often
malicious) code.

It has several major independent open-source implementations
(http://www.mozilla.org/js/spidermonkey/ and
http://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme/ and
http://code.google.com/p/v8/) all of which include some kind of JIT
(there's been a lot of competition on performance over the past couple
of years) and all of which have their own approaches to C integration.

On the other hand, the implementations vary in their suitability for
real-time use (non-incremental GC pauses), and in support for
multithreading, debugging, non-standard language extensions, non-x86
JIT, etc, so there's always some tradeoffs.

-- 
Philip Taylor
ex...@gm...