Post #3613076

2025-12-29 20:14 UTC

@zwarich@hachyderm.io @joe@f.duriansoftware.com @foonathan@fosstodon.org @dotstdy@mastodon.social @ianh@mastodon.social My prediction is that at some point in the next 5 years this whole “systems language” fad will blow over as programmers get tired of constantly being forced to deal with value semantics and unique ownership, and they’re going to rediscover the simplicity and elegance of garbage collection with uniform tagged pointers, at which point they’ll give this paradigm some really dumb name and pretend it’s brand new

Replies (1)

@zwarich@hachyderm.io 2026-01-05 16:47

@slava@mathstodon.xyz @joe@f.duriansoftware.com @foonathan@fosstodon.org @dotstdy@mastodon.social @ianh@mastodon.social I thought about this some more the past few days and one of the things that I keep coming back to is that if you add mutation to your language you’re faced with the problem of data races, and the type system features for the elimination of data races don’t look all the different from ownership systems used by safe systems languages. There is Midori (https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~csg63/papers/oopsla12.pdf), Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/media/papers/fast-cheap.pdf), Verona (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/reference-capabilities-for-flexible-memory-management/), etc. Of course, you could take the Java/C# copout of making data races memory safe (and maybe tack on the Go approach of optional dynamic race detection), but the issues that arise from this model are not very easy to debug.

Open ##3613075