Re: C++ religious war (was: llua Higher-level C API for Lua)

[Jeremy Ong <jeremycong@...>]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 11:55 AM, steve donovan
<steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 8:38 PM, Jeremy Ong <jeremycong@gmail.com> wrote:
>> of Erlang, etc. It's just a prettier java maybe.
>
> Perhaps that's what the world needs at the moment ;)

Look at Elixir. The thing Erlang did right was per-process heaps and
thus amortized garbage collection for the entire vm. Go has no such
thing so while it may have better throughput, it won't offer the
latency guarantees that Erlang (or Elixir) would. Since latency is
King on the web, I'd never care about Go's runtime. If I needed a high
throughput server, I'd use C or C++.

> Well, as we've
> said, there is no one language that suits every role.  And Go was not
> intended to be an _interesting_ language, in the same sense that
> Gosling said of Java that it was not a "PhD thesis" language.
>

Yea I hear you. I hope the above paragraph I just wrote will clarify
that I meant interesting in the sense of "that would be useful for
this or that application."

> Having that kind of straightforward concurrency in Lua would be a
> fantastic thing.
>

It's hard to do concurrency well in a portable fashion. This is why
<thread> from the C++11 standard library is such a big deal. I've
actually made hooks for Lua to invoke these calls so I have
threading/concurrency in Lua with similar semantics but it's still
experimental.