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InfoQ Homepage Research What's Your Next Native Language?

What's Your Next Native Language?

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InfoQ has previously asked "What's your next JVM language" and "What's Your Next Language on the Javascript Platform?".
But what about systems that require neither of those platforms or even need to be independent of heavyweight VMs? What about tools and services that need instantaneous startup and can't support long warmup delays common in JITed systems. What about systems with restricted resources (CPU, memory) that would still benefit from being written in a modern language without the horrific security track record of C.

The Languages

  1. Go: Google's Go language has seen steadily increasing uptake in the industry as well as powering new tools such as Docker, etcd, Doozer, and others.
  2. Rust: has been in development for a few years and promises to give ultimate power over memory allocation and other important aspects, as well as removing many common security and stability problems commonly associated with native lanugages. The 1.0 release is close and the Mozilla Servo code base has been built using Rust.
  3. D: has been gunning for C++' position in the market for quite a while, being a more modern, yet as flexible language for native development. 
  4. Swift: Apple's new language seems destined for fast adoption in the iOS and OS X development space, while bringing some long expected improvements over Objective-C.
  5. Objective-C: Sticking with Objective-C rather than Swift for Apple platforms?
  6. Haskell: Haskell compilers allow to use both leading edge functional language concepts while compiling down to binaries.
  7. Ocaml: Ocaml has seen adoption in certain areas like finance and has a strong community with interesting projects like OpenMirage.
  8. C++ 14: modern C++ is a very different language than 10 years ago, with Lambdas, etc. Is now the time to adopt C++?
  9. C 11: are you staying away from languages invented after 1980 and sticking with C, albeit in its 2011 revision?

As usual, this is not a complete list of native languages and is probably missing your favorite native language, be it Ada, Eiffel, or Delphi; feel free to use the comments section to tell us all about it.

 

 

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