Hacker News Reader

Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

Is there a single example of a language+runtime where this approach has ever been successful

I do think Go and Java are strong examples of this. Those languages have native code support, but it’s clunky to use and, more importantly, very rare.

If you removed JNA/JNI/CGo, plenty of people would complain…but the vast majority of uses of those languages would still work, unaltered, because most common tasks on the JVM and Go runtime don’t require external native deps.

Well, see popularity of CGO among Go devs, or JNI among Java devs, or the ongoing work to make all the learnings from System C# (from Midori) available in regular C#, while C++/CLI is slowly left in maintenance mode (last updated for partial C++20 support, and not part of FOSS .NET)

All of those are for non native code to call code in those languages. Nobody is saying "all Go code must never invoke native code". That would be wild and to my knowledge, there's no major language that forces such a constraint.

All the languages I mentioned compile to native code.

I can't tell if you're being willfully ignorant or not. The comment I was replying to was proposing banning C extensions: invoking native binaries that are not written in the host language and compiled in (at build or runtime). What you're describing has nothing to do with that.

Why would a Go binary (to keep the examples short), compiled to native code, with a compiler toolchain that includes support for Assembly if necessary, and a syscall package as well, have to depend on C extensions?

CGO only exists as a matter of convenience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com