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by rdtsc 4368 days ago
I do like Nimrod. It has been around for a while. Has good syntax, good semantics (things it operates with). Very fast.

Sadly it doesn't have the advocacy and hoard of developers supporting it and writing libraries for it. Certainly no big company with billions of dollars of revenue. It is unfortunate.

I feel like Google should have just taken it and used it as Go back then. I would have been a good choice.

There is also GNOME's Vala language. More focused on GLib but the idea is the same. C# like language compiles to C. Good performance. But again kind of fringe.

This "fringe-ness" in longer term translates in less libraries/frameworks. With Python if I am starting on something new, I know I can probably find someone that wrote a library related to it. Scientific computing, AI learning, graphics, GUI bindings, http parsing, WSGI middleware, strange protocol parsers, libraries on top of C libs (parse .pcap files) and so on. All are just one search and download away.

With Nimrod (or any new language) I am afraid I would be writing those by hand.
1 comments
Dewie 4368 days ago
> There is also GNOME's Vala language. More focused on GLib but the idea is the same. C# like language compiles to C. Good performance. But again kind of fringe.

It seems like native imperative languages with automatic memory management has just fallen by the wayside as history has progressed, or have been relegated to niches. I wonder why that is.

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pjmlp 4368 days ago
Java happened. Sun took the JIT from SELF and everyone went JIT, repeating the VM everywhere from the P-Code days. Forgetting the native wave that followed.

However Java and C# do have quite a few native compilers available. They just tend to be forgotten on discussions about them.

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Dewie 4368 days ago
> However Java and C# do have quite a few native compilers available. They just tend to be forgotten on discussions about them.

Are there any viable ones for java? It would be pretty cool if one could leverage some of the java ecosystem without having to include a vm. EDIT: I'm guessing that making command line utilities would be more viable, for example.

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pjmlp 4368 days ago
Most of them are commercial.

Excelsior JET - http://www.excelsiorjet.com/

Codename One - http://www.codenameone.com/

Atego Perc - http://www.atego.com/products/atego-perc/

JamaicaVM - https://www.aicas.com/cms/en/JamaicaVM

IBM J9 - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/wireless/wece/

Atego, Jamaica and J9 are not full native compilers, rather JVMs with support for AOT deployment, similar to .NET NGEN/JIT story.

Additionally Oracle has kept the Sun's work from the meta-circular JVM, Maxime as Graal and Truffle. Which may replace Hotspot for Java 9 or later and being used by AMD/Oracle for the GPGPU support.

This Java meta-circular compiler has support for JIT and AOT compilation.

https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Main

EDIT: I forgot to mention the efforts of the guys behind RoboVM, currently the best way to target iOS with Java, http://www.robovm.org/

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