[ale] Ruby vs C, a non-technical chat

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2015-08-06 at 05:08 -0700, Darrell Golliher wrote:
> Maybe it’s never be more than a niche language — I can’t predict the
> future on that one.  I hear good things about Rust and with Apple’s
> Swift being open sourced it has a shot a being generally useful too. 
>     Javascript has even gotten more interesting with the rise of the
> node, express and angular (aka. MEAN stack when you add mongoldb).
> 
> Anyway.. I digress.  I was trying to plug Go. :-)
The new wave of native languages is fascinating and quite useful. 
 Sadly, each one has a niche environment at the moment.  That might not
be the case in 10 years, but today I can write code in C++ and compile
it for anything and everything ranging from 8-bit MCUs to gigantic
multicore multiprocessor 64-bit server systems (though practically
speaking I don't go smaller than 32-bit ARM MCUs without a special
reason).  I don't see Go, Rust, or Swift being able to work in the MCU
world like that anytime soon.
Then again, the last two projects I did treated the Linux kernel as the
platform, and didn't use nearly anything else on top of it except for
the C and C++ runtime libraries.
I look forward to the finalization of WebAssembly.  Emscripten and
asm.js are great, but I think that having a lower-level target for C
and C++ compilers to bring those languages to the Web usefully and
portably will increase the amount of code which uses those languages
online, and that's not a bad thing.  One need not have all the heavy
libraries running in the browser; if you can use C++ and a BSD socket
API to communicate with a WebSocket server, you can RPC anything
lightly.
	-- Mike
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