Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Maybe the functional programming/managed code fans should step up to the plate and rewrite the operating systems, desktop environments, and hundreds of thousands of command line tools etc that have all been implemented in C or C++.

Not as toy, proof-of-concepts. Fully fledged replacements for all that stuff that can be used in our our daily work. Build distros of the stuff so that we don't have to pick and choose this stuff and replace the bits of our systems in a piecemeal fashion.

They could show us how it's done instead of talking endlessly about it in online forums. So let's face it, it's never going to happen.




Hm, where did I say anything about FP?

As for managed code, it's being used with huge success in a lot of places (not in OS-es or drivers, yes) but that's quite the huge topic by itself.


I never implied you did, they are merely one of the two major major groups of programmers I see consistently deriding C based infrastructure that presumably enables their paychecks to a large extent.

I'm not defending C, I'm merely sneering at its noisy detractors who spend more time complaining about it than supplanting it.


Well, people are working on it. For example, what's been happening in Firefox. C/C++ has a head start in the millions of person-hours.


One could argue as a counterpoint that the Rust community (and all the other language communities) have millions of person-hours (and lines of of C/C++ open source code) to reference as they RIIR, a luxury the C/C++ community didn't really have, much of what they've built since Linux appeared was developed from scratch. Outside of 386BSD, there wasn't a lot of unencumbered UNIX source code available to them.

Perhaps as the Rust community grows in size and momentum this will happen more. Right now it seems like a bit of a manpower problem.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: