InfoQ Homepage Language Design Content on InfoQ
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Interview on Rust, a Systems Programming Language Developed by Mozilla
Rust is a systems programming language developed by Mozilla and targeted at high performance applications. This post contains an interview with Graydon Hoare, Rust’s creator.
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Trying to Answer the Question: Why Some Languages Succeed While Others Fail?
Two researchers at UC Berkeley have investigated programming languages adoption from a sociological perspective. This article summarizes their research and includes an interview with the authors.
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D1 is Being Discontinued in 2012
Digital Mars, makers of the C++ alternative D, have decided to discontinue the original version of D. They had been maintaining D1 along with its successor D2 since 2007, but with the later now well established they feel it is no longer appropriate to dedicate resources to the older language past December 2012.
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Google Dart Roundup: Dart to JS Compiler Frog, Pre-Built Editor/IDE Binaries, Type System Proposals
Pre-built versions of Dart Editor, the Eclipse-based Dart IDE, are now available, making it easy to try Dart. Frog is a new Dart to Javascript compiler - written in Dart by the creator of the Jython and IronPython projects. Meanwhile the Dart team has been busy explaining the Dart language and proposing features to round out the type system, eg. nullable types and more.
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Google Dart Language and Tools Announced - Dynamic Language, Optionally Typed, Familiar Syntax
Google has announced a new language: Google Dart and tools. The language and tools are currently considered a technology preview, and an open source release is available now. The language is not yet in Chrome. Dart is dynamic, optional types and reified Generics. Concurrency uses Erlang-style processes called Isolates, share nothing with async message passing.
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Java Lambda Syntax based on C#, Scala
A recent posting on the lambda-dev mailing list announced the conclusion that the Java Lambda syntax will be based on C# syntax, very similar to Scala's implementation that many are already familiar with: "It was better to choose something that has already been shown to work well in the two languages that are most like Java – C# and Scala – rather than to invent something new."
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An Overview of the X++ Programming Language
X++ is a 17 year old programming language with a syntax that meshes the structural and imperative features of Java with the set-based operations of SQL. It is primarily used within Dynamics AX, an enterprise resource planning platform. Originally a completely proprietary language, as of 2009 X++ can be compiled to .NET’s Intermediate Languages.
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Interactive Extensions for LINQ to Objects
Interactive Extensions (Ix) is a set of additional LINQ to Objects query operators based on the work done in the Reactive Extensions. A quick look through the API reveals a set of IEnumerable extension methods under the System.Linq namespace. While most developers already have many of these in their own utility libraries, having a standard implementation for these missing features would be useful.
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ClojureScript Brings Clojure To The Browser via Javascript
Rich Hickey has announced ClojureScript, a version of Clojure that is compiled to Javascript code, which will bring the Clojure language to the browser and to the mobile space. InfoQ takes a look at the rationale for and implementation of ClojureScript.
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An Introduction to D and Visual D
D is a systems programming language from Digital Mars that focuses on “combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python.” While still being a statically typed language that compiles directly to native code, the syntax looks very much like Java or C# but it has some interesting advances.
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Creating a new JVM language
Creating a new JVM based language has recently hit the for with the news of the proposed Ceylon project. In fact, the JVM already has a diverse set of languages, both statically typed and dynamically typed. What does it take for a new language to hit the mark?
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Ceylon JVM Language
Gavin King, creator of Hibernate, gave a presentation at QCon Beijing on the Ceylon JVM language. Ceylon addresses some limitations of the Java programming language although the project is near the inception phase, with no compiler or IDE support. Since its existence leaked out over twitter, there has been a lot of speculation about the language; read on to find out more from Gavin King
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Erlang Copied Scala's Actors & Erlang's VM is almost a Clone of the JVM
Erlang Co-creators, Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding, admit that Erlang is heavily inspired by the Java world. In an interview at ErlangFactory 2011 SF, they reveal how Scala Actors had shaped their work in what they then called Erlang Processes. Moreover, they acknowledge the fact that Erlang's VM is barely a clone of the famous JVM.
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Going Beyond the Standard: Continuations in Mono
While Mono usually strives to follow the C# and Common Language Infrastructure specifications, it does occasionally go beyond them. While some features such as SIMD support are backwards-compatible with .NET, runtime supported continuations are exclusive to Mono.
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SGen: Mono’s Generational Garbage Collector
Mono had a dirty little secret. Until recently it used the portable but woefully inaccurate Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector. After two long years of work Mono is making the shift to a new generational garbage collector that is specific to the CLR and far more precise than anything they’ve had before.