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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone else is interested in C-replacement type languages, I've been collecting a list:

  ATS: http://www.ats-lang.org/
  BitC (seems to be dead): http://www.bitc-lang.org/index.html
  Tart: https://code.google.com/p/tart/
  Deca: https://code.google.com/p/decac/
  Cyclone: http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/wiki/Why%20Cyclone/
  Nimrod: http://nimrod-code.org/
  Habit (Haskell adapted for systems programming): http://hasp.cs.pdx.edu/

Plus of course the obvious ones, Go, Rust, D. I don't keep track of these projects' usability, I just write them down as I come across them.

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We indeed have a similar list. Habit had slipped from my memory. I really wish Cyclone gets resurrected. There was quite a bit of discussion on HN when its closure(no pun intended) was announced. You may like digging into Felix.

Apart from this family the other I have been window-shopping on is the high performance/productivity family, consisting of the likes X10, Chapel and Fortress. Thanks to Oracle, Fortress is now abandonware.

Off late I have been quite disappointed by this trend in HN to be very hostile to things that I would consider to be the very distinguishing traits of a Hacker. Now it seems some people here compete to jump over the other to complain against things that encourage/facilitate or are meant for tweaking, learning, exploring and breaking: all things that I consider the very essence of hacking. Case in point, recent discussion on Gentoo.

The behavior reminds me of a bunch of desperate and wannabe Pink Floyd fans we had in college, who would jump to rally the crowd to disco to the opening strains of Another Brick in the Wall, much to our bewilderment but apparently to look cool.

There is always Java, if you are happy with it, stay happy with it.

I've actually never programmed in Java (just a little Clojure). I'm hoping to take a class in it this fall.

Felix is on my big list of interesting languages, but I didn't really think of it in the same category as these. I'm sort of aiming for something better than C when I get around to writing an OS kernel, you know, "someday".

Don't say someday, look at Remo and do it like he did, just use one of these languages in your everyday projects.

http://www.codeblog.ch/2011/06/statically-linked-linux-execu...

By "someday" I mean "after I finish a bunch of other more pressing projects". ;)

Oh! the Java comment was not for you.

I think for your use case decac, clay, bitC and Cyclone would indeed be ideal. There is this Haskell like language with effects based typesystem that might be worth looking at, the name continues to escape me.

One can go very low level with Felix, after all you can write inline C, C++ and define C and C++ functions, but those are not type checked. ABI could also be an issue given that it compiles to C++.

All the best for fun with kernel writing :)

> There is this Haskell like language with effects based typesystem that might be worth looking at, the name continues to escape me.

Disciple ? (DDC) http://disciple.ouroborus.net/

I wrote a little OS dev 'starter' for Nimrod which might interest you: https://github.com/dom96/nimkernel

Having such a list myself, I would add:

Myrrdin: http://eigenstate.org/myrddin.html

Pascal: http://www.freepascal.org/

Cyclone is pretty dead.

Good catch on myrddin. I had seen it before but neglected to write it down. I didn't really know pascal was in that space at all.

As the author of Myrddin, I'm kind of surprised that it's even been mentioned -- I'm not aware of it being used anywhere significant yet. (And the insignificant uses are just half-baked toy programs that I've written for myself).

It's pretty incomplete, and definitely not ready for prime time yet.

My list is not about "useable C replacements" ;)

I like to read about this stuff and compare design decisions between languages.

    http://code.google.com/p/june-language/ (java+python)
    http://code.google.com/p/j-rest/ (meta: api creator)
    https://code.google.com/p/szl/ (google data project)
    http://luvit.io/ (nodejs for lua)
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/sisal/

    http://zenlang.sourceforge.net/index.html (in dev)
    http://ufo.wikispaces.com/ (in dev)

Ok, the last one is a joke, but worth sharing, haha really funnny how people spent their time

    http://code.google.com/p/penor-programming-language/ (a joke?)

Thank you, that's cool! I have been looking for Deca for hours in my Bookmarks and the Web, didn't remember the name. (I have collected some languages to study too)

BitC isn't dead see here: http://www.coyotos.org/pipermail/bitc-dev/

Hmm, the last I remember hearing about it was a notice about how the creators were sort of giving up on it, and the website I had stored apparently hasn't been updated since 2010.

Yes, they plan to go a different direction, but it doesn't mean they give up with BitC (as of now), it's probably going to be refactored. The author discusses it in the 2013 post.

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