I feel proponents of any programming language put a lot of spin around what isolated aspects it is good for, but fail to illustrate what a programmer in even one target domain gains from using it.

Are there programming language implementations unlike what is described above, that you feel back up their marketing?

  • Life is Tetris@leminal.spaceOP
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    13 hours ago

    Just as an example, neither the C++ documentation nor its sagely bloggers have ever shown why it is a good fit for, say, systems programming. A really neat way of handling bit-level data is actually in Erlang’s bit syntax.

    Separately, I spluttered when I realized that Boost includes 2 statechart libraries which proclaim the approach is widely useful, but nothing else in Boost uses it - not asio or its ilk, not the parser libraries, not the graph library.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      Just as an example, neither the C++ documentation nor its sagely bloggers have ever shown why it is a good fit for, say, systems programming. A really neat way of handling bit-level data is actually in Erlang’s bit syntax.

      Erlang requires a runtime environment, which disqualifies it for situations where you don’t have a filesystem to load the runtime from, like developing a kernel or for microcontrollers.
      Of the popular languages, your choices are virtually just C, C++ and Rust for that.

      More towards your general question: Not needing a runtime environment also means you can use C, C++ and Rust for cross-language libraries. For example, SQLite and OpenSSL have just been implemented once in C, and then you simply have a thin wrapper for Java, Python etc…
      If you are looking to build a library that can be used by as many devs as possible, that’s a selling point which is hard to ignore.

    • for_some_delta@beehaw.org
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      10 hours ago

      Boost is too monolithic to be useful. I am not surprised it has redundant functionality. Get the great parts of Boost like asio separately.