Hacker News Reader

Comment by zija | Hacker News Reader

From top popular language, say from https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-2..., only Go and Swift/ Objective-C are languages with static typing, compiled to native tool chain . And Swift are very apple centric.

This have huge impact for go popularity. Alternative to Go: - java and JVM language are heavy gorilla languages that's need more resources/ no value types. graal native is not straightforward alternative. - C# is good alternative, but again jitted, and there are no alternative for Microsoft products in open source community,people choose go as default alternative to java few years ago..

View on HN

I think you're discounting how much having Google backing you adds to popularity. D has static typing, compiles to native, works on every major platform, and has been around far longer, but doesn't have near the adoption of Go.

Same case for Nim, I really enjoy working with it.

Or Pascal. Wirth's most popular languages

It has a unique combination of features that I cannot find in any other languages

Unfortunately there is a disturbing lack of quality libraries. I have to write everything myself. Really everything. A few days ago I wrote my own string to int conversion.

Having actually tried using D, it has far more warts than Go.

.NET has had AOT support since its origin, although it only supports dynamic linking.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/tools/ngen...

Since Windows 8, .NET Native is also a thing, and then there are the other AOT toolchains like Xamarin and IL2CPP.

AOT compilation has been part of Java world for those willing to pay for commercial JDKs, specially in the embedded domains.

In fact, the JIT caches with PGO optimization now available for free on Hotspot and OpenJ9, come from JRockit and IBM J9 respectively.

Did you forget about C++ and Rust?

No, i like Rust very much. But Rust require from me to deep dive with language, it's not productive language, it's correct from start to end language. Language with optional GC, value types like Nim or D are better for small hobby projects. But community and library ecosystem and tooling are weak. On other hand there are Ocaml and F#. But Ocaml for windows is weak, community is small etc F# inherits problems from c#

That's a fair point, but I don't find Rust really harder to use than Go for small hobby projects. Swift is nice as a language but has a huge lack of libraries.

OK, but this:

> From top popular language, say from https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-2..., only Go and Swift/ Objective-C are languages with static typing, compiled to native tool chain

is still false.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com