Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

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>Nor C++ or Ada, so what?

Volumes could be written as a reply.

>Linux isn't some kind of golden rule for all OSes on the galaxy.

Just about every operating system or major piece of system software is written in C, or limited C++ that is defacto C. Rust has a universe more of a likelihood to supplant those than Go or C#. And in fact is the only modern language making any headway in those cases. We're about two decades past people deploying the trite "Oh well that's just legacy inertia..." argument.

Google didn't write Fuchsia in Go, and hasn't used an iota of it in ChromeOS or Android. Microsoft uses somewhere approximating 0% .NET/C# code in the Windows core. Microsoft research made a toy .NET OS once that, unsurprisingly, went nowhere, just as you can find irrelevant toy example projects pushing the same premise, but they're dead ends.

This is of course meaningless for the vast majority of projects that the residents of HN are working on, where the compromises of Go, C#/.NET, GCs, etc, are massively outweighed by the benefits they bring to those sorts of projects.

>I am more than happy to do bare metal coding in C# (Meadow) and Go (TinyGo) without having to deal with Linux.

Okay?

> Just about every operating system or major piece of system software is written in C

My friends writing safety critical bare metal industrial control software using Ada would, I suspect, feel this was a somewhat limited perspective.

If you ever do consider writing such volumes, I would recommend getting co-authors to cover the areas you're less familiar with.

Given that I said "just about", ergo not all, I'm not quite sure what the point of your comment is. Pointing out that someone somewhere is using something else, even haughtily adding some ill-considered snark, doesn't seem particularly useful in that context.

It's a big industry. There are loads of exceptions and they still comprise a tiny minority.

"just about" is still a vast overestimate, but you're right - while I did my best to be polite while pointing out the extent to which the wall of ill-considered snark I was replying to was, at best, woefully underinformed, I readily admit that I did still fall somewhat short.

"while I did my best to be polite while pointing out the extent to which the wall of ill-considered snark I was replying to was, at best, woefully underinformed, I readily admit that I did still fall somewhat short."

I was being polite in not openly pointing out that your comment was trolling of absolutely no value or purpose, predicated entirely on your own misreading, but here we are.

Waiting for that volume to arrive.

As for the rest it would be a waste of my time on Earth to prove you wrong and change your mind.

Okay?

Yes, that is okay. There is little you could say on this that would be convincing given the every action of Microsoft, Google, and ranks of proven, competent developers who are building so-called low-level systems that power the world. I concur that it would be a "waste of time".

After all, I am willing to waste some minutes with you.

Since IBM i, IBM z, Unisys ClearPath exist, and power the world of insurances and finance, this sentence is obviously false.

> Google didn't write Fuchsia in Go

Indeed, only the TCP/IP stack and volume management tooling, should be easy for you to find out about them.

Then there is this thing called gVisor, it is powering parts of the world that run on top of Google Kubernetes Engine.

Maybe something there for you to learn as well.

> Microsoft uses somewhere approximating 0% .NET/C# code in the Windows core

On the NT kernel, yes, yet good luck using Windows only with the kernel, without the remaining layers, many of which developed in a mix of COM and .NET.

A basic proof how much Windows systems programming experience you have.

Ah then there is this thing called IoT Edge runtime for intelligent devices, written in a mix of Rust and C#.

And before I forget, NVIDIA DRIVE AGX firmware is written in Ada/SPARK.

Bye and learn to grow beyond the Linux bubble.

Not only did Google not write Fucshia in Go, they explicitly made it a forbidden language (listing a litany of reasons to exclude it and any other GC language -- the same reasons that apply to most "low-level" code), they set a goal to migrate any parts imported in. Maybe not the best example.

"A basic proof how much Windows systems programming experience you have."

Which programming language would one write "COM" in? I am so poorly skilled that I must have missed that language. I spent a decade+ writing Windows code, including exposing it through COM/COM+/DCOM, but apparently I was doing it wrong.

And while there is loads of C++ in what we consider the Windows platform, there is vanishingly little .NET.

The "Linux bubble" comment is especially weird. I spend my day in macOS, with most of my day being in XCode slinging Swift and GoLand spinning Go. Somehow I can evaluate the world without trying to mangle it to fit whatever my current primary skills are.

I don't really follow what you two are arguing about - I think it's pretty clear you can in theory write systems-level programs in most of those languages. However if the focus is on Operating Systems, there have been a few formally verified OS's written in Ada/Spark that are worth looking at (if I correctly read these posts as saying that's not possible).

It's kind of all over the place.

The initial point is simply that Go or C# or Java in their normal form aren't "system programming" suitable (which generally means low-level kernels and system services and projects having similar needs. Notepad on Windows isn't system programming), and it's unrealistic for Go to be ranked highly on such a list, much less before Rust which is purpose built for this task.

Could someone use them for system programming? Sure they could. It would be the wrong tool but people makes loads of bad decisions.

The point about Linux and other operating system choices wasn't a rule, it was an observation that the rhetoric often plied on developer boards -- usually where developers want everything to be a nail to their skillset hammer -- has little correlation with the world. Nowhere did I exclude Ada or any other compiled, non-GCd (which Ada never uses when used for anything of any criticality) languages. Anything can make just as good of native code.

> Not only did Google not write Fucshia in Go, they explicitly made it a forbidden language

It's more correct to say that they attempted to write part of Fuchsia in Go, but the results performed so badly that they decided it would need to be rewritten in another language.

Just as Microsoft once made a good faith effort to rewrite Windows in C# (Longhorn) before that effort had to be abandoned.

Longhorn failed due to sabotage from Windows team due to the usual WinDev vs DevDiv politics, hence why since Vista all Longhorn ideas have been redone in COM, and COM followed by WinRT (COM + IInspectable + TLB replaced with .NET metadata).

Midori had no issues powering Asian Bing servers during its life in production.

The late build of Longhorn that leaked back in the day performed so poorly that it took forever just to boot on the computers of the era.

I have no doubt the usual Microsoft politics of the era applied as well.

> Not only did Google not write Fucshia in Go, they explicitly made it a forbidden language (listing a litany of reasons to exclude it and any other GC language -- the same reasons that apply to most "low-level" code), they set a goal to migrate any parts imported in. Maybe not the best example.

It helps when the Go guy on the team is no longer there to argue for it.

> Which programming language would one write "COM" in? ....

VB 6, Delphi, .NET, C++ Builder, C++/CX, C++ with MFC/ATL/WRL, whatever language speaks the COM ABI.

Yeah, maybe you were doing it wrong.

> The "Linux bubble" comment is especially weird. I spend my day in macOS, with most of my day being in XCode slinging Swift and GoLand spinning Go. Somehow I can evaluate the world without trying to mangle it to fit whatever my current primary skills are.

Good for you then, happy future.

"Yeah, maybe you were doing it wrong."

I think you misread my comment which was pointing out that COM is an interfacing standard, and has little to nothing to do with language choices or this conversation. Pointing out that there are multiple languages that can build to it isn't a counterpoint, but actually is the reason I made my comment. It's like saying you "developed the program in JSON over HTTP" in a conversation about programming languages.

Though regardless of that, Microsoft uses C++ for the overwhelming majority of a Windows install (this is trivial to verify). This is meaningless, having nothing to do with the root comment, but somehow this conversation was pulled there.

Windows programs can be written in just about anything. No one ever contested that. "Low-level" code, however, is seldom done in the GC languages. Seldom doesn't mean never, as stated over and over again, and Googling for random fringe counterexamples aren't counterpoints.

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