Comment by 🐙 norayr

Re: "[gemini link] I've been using Rust for about five years..."

here as a side note some words about contemporary pascal. i dislike it because the de facto standard (not iso) was driven by a company, and it had to market it, add features, closely tie to an ide, etc.

i like that there is floss compiler fpc, and though it mostly (but not always) follows the language standard defined by a company behind delphi, it has many valuable properties and it is very underappreciated (though not as much as ada, modula and oberon).

🐙 norayr

2023-11-13 · 7 months ago

4 Later Comments ↓

🐙 norayr · 2023-11-13 at 00:08:

no dependency on libc by default. compiled binaries are statically linked with runtime library which uses kernel syscalls directly, bypassing libc.

those binaries are of very small size: about 20kb.

stand alone commandline compiler, no dependency on the ide, i usually use vim, support in gdb, almost every architecture and os is supported.

very efficient memory manager: programs compiled with fpc are outstanding in compiler benchmarks by very low memory usage.

🐙 norayr · 2023-11-13 at 00:16:

enegy efficiency: if you look at

— that famous research

you'll see in the table 5 (pareto optimal sets for different combination of objectives) that there is always c on the first line, but also there go twice and there is pascal three times.

time & memory: winners are: c, pascal go

energy & time: c alone

energy and memory: c and pascal (pascal is better than c if we take only memory usage)

energy, time and memory: all three share the first line; c, pascal, go.

🐙 norayr · 2023-11-13 at 00:17:

unlike other languages i mentioned (ada, modulas, oberon) pascal has a reasonably big community, many libraries.

lazarus is a great tool to create gui programs. same program can be compiled with gtk backend or qt backend, or for winfows or macos. or amigaos or morphos. or by using a toolkit written in pascal.

you dont need anymore to change your program because underlying ui toolkit gets deprecated: community updates the lcl (lazarus component library) backend, lets say it also supports not only gtk2 but gtk3, or newer version of qt, you just recompile your program and you get a version which works with newer or different ui toolkit.

🐙 norayr · 2023-11-13 at 00:18:

wide list of supported platforms also mean you can write with fpc for an old palm pda or for game boy advance.

Original Post

🌒 s/programming

[gemini link] I've been using Rust for about five years now, but I'm beginning to sour on it. I'm curious about perspectives here.

💬 jeang3nie · 24 comments · 4 likes · 2023-08-20 · 9 months ago