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I write software (C++) for a living.

#Emacs #Prolog #Erlang #SelfHosted

  • pro-communalism
  • anti-consumerism
  • pro-holisticism
  • anti-monism
  • pro-libre software
  • fan of #Plan9 and #HaikuOS

anti-witchhunt, see https://stallmansupport.org/

  • 4 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: May 15th, 2025

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  • My ₹1. It may depend on what you plan to write in it (for fun). The BEAM sounds great for long-running processes, but not as much for point tools; Erlang and co supposedly run slower than Python, which isn’t fast either.

    My other ₹ ;-) if you stick to the BEAM: OCaml sort of runs on it, as there is the Caramel project to replicate it (https://caramel.run/). One of the Erlang creators also ported Prolog to the BEAM (erlog), as well as Lua (erlua) and Lisp (LFE). Elixir is probably great, as it is inspired by Ruby (I found Ruby very pleasant, other languages have so much semantic noise).

    Freebie! The BEAM inspired an inspirational design for parallel programming, the Pony language. I am somewhat sad development slowed down, it is a Rust killer.






  • By the vague looks of it, he has tried Rust for something he would use C for. His impression of Rust’s utility in that domain seems unsurprising.

    Beyond that


    I used to not question why we build anything other than “system software” in C/C++. Once I questioned that, I quickly got past the “Why not Ada/D/etc.” stage and reached the “why is so much of large software written in mid-level languages” stage. For anything bigger than, say, a Unix CLI tool, it probably is, and has always been, wrong to use anything at the level of C (C++, Ada, D, Nim, Rust, Zig, etc.).

    This choice of language level for “application software” seems to be a commercial choice. The software commons is using such languages probably because contributors want to hone their job-oriented skills. It got better with Python and Ruby uptake in open projects. But, efficient, safe but simple languages, say, OCaml and Erlang, have been available for decades. Crystal is also looking good right now.







  • What hardware/VM and OS are you running on? What kind of development do you do in Emacs?

    And, are you normalizing having to read the docs to have, for example, indent-region not be too slow?

    I agree native-comp shouldn’t be necessary, since Emacs wasn’t this slow until maybe Emacs 25 and they keep improving the Elisp interpreter. And we probably can’t expect the speed from before the CPU vulnerability mitigations and from running on hardware from any software running in VMs nowadays.

    What I see is much worse than that.