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Comment by bnolsen | Hacker News Reader

sounds like the mainframe has been reinvented...

Yeah, technology-wise, we're approaching what we had in the 1970s before microcomputers.

Except now it's all a lot cheaper.

To really be back to them, we need to replace C and C++ with the safer systems programming languages that those mainframes already enjoyed in the late 60's.

ESPOL, NEWP, Algol-68RS are a few examples.

That is going to take a while, maybe a few developer generations still.

Go, Rust, Swift

Swift is the only one being actively pushed into developers by an OS vendor.

Apparently Genode OS has now integrated Rust, but they still aren't using it.

It would be nice if the Android team recognised the work being done by the Go team and integrated Go into its OS at very least on the NDK, but I don't see it happen. Specially after seeing their reaction about Java alternatives at this Google IO. The attitude "nothing but Java" is still the official one.

On Windows I would like to see .NET Native become more relevant and bring System C# goodies to mainstream Windows.

But...isn't Java a "safer systems language" in much the same way Swift is? So, it's a lot like Swift in that regard, in that Google is pushing it. And, there are other JVM languages, including some that are at least as nice as Swift. Kotlin looks really promising.

I'm not sure why Java should be excluded if we're talking about systems languages other than C/C++ that are safer.

Java is not a systems programming language due to the lack of value types, com.misc.unsafe not being an official package and AOT compilation is not part of the standard toolchain (only third parties have JDKs with AOT compilers).

Also Google is pushing Android Java, not Java, with its partial support of standard Java features.

If you see their Google IO talks, they really mean Java and not other languages that happen to target the JVM.

Because it's an applications language, and not a systems language, Java uses garbage collection, which has unpredictable performance, while Swift doesn't.

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