Go Rust Swift, Vala
In the WWDC keynote speech, Apple announced their new programming language named Swift. It looks like a scripting language, but it actually compiles to binary, giving you lots of performance. For years, I’ve been griping about the need for a programming language that’s as easy as scripting, while delivering decently high performance. Lately, we’ve seen a number of new languages that do exactly this. So, it’s time to discuss a few of these new, modern languages.
Go
Go was developed at Google and was first publicly released at the end of 2009. It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a fan of Go, and I’ll admit that of the four new languages discussed here, it’s the only one I actually wrote a decent amount of code in.
Go is awesome for parallel programming. Goroutines and communication channels are plain brilliant. In fact, it completely changes the way you think about parallel programming. Go’s duck typing system is marvelous, an enormous sigh of relief after decades of OOP and I just want to hug the creators of Go.
And yet, it has not yet become my primary language of choice. A big reason for that is mandatory CamelCasing. In Go, lower/upper CamelCasing actually controls whether the symbol is being exported or not; a really awkward design decision (golang’s only mishap?).
Go is great for systems programming (ie. for UNIX tools, services), however … it’s as clunky as C when trying to parse a config file, and its flag command-line argument parser module isn’t great either. Then I tried making a game in Go and simply couldn’t get started because there were no stable bindings for the needed libs at hand at the time.
Go has a very “C feel” to it, every time I code in it I feel like I’m constructing a tiny, delicate machine. Everything about Go is excellently engineered. Some clever men with beards really thought things through.
What will golang’s popularity be, five years from now? We shall see if it’s truly to replace C/C++ as top systems programming language.
Rust
Mozilla’s language named Rust started in 2006, but didn’t go public until 2010. Rust is quite impressive, but the tutorial kind of lost me once it started on heap allocation, object ownership of memory, control of mutability, references, and confusing syntax involving glyphs. This leads to some pretty horrific code that shouldn’t have been that way, in my opinion. Secretly, Rust is trying hard to be like C++.
The tutorial has some notes on features that are currently missing or buggy. In that respect, Rust is not ready for prime time yet. It does show a lot of potential and it did manage to create a buzz in the open source world, so check back once it hits version 1.0.
Swift
Apple’s Swift language was announced only last week and is said to have been in development since 2010. At a glance, it’s suspiciously a lot like Rust. This is particularly interesting given the fact that Rust is sponsored by rival company Samsung. What’s the true story behind this?
Anyway, Swift looks awesome, and it’s already miles ahead of Rust. Swift builds upon a foundation laid by Objective-C, all the way from NextStep to OS X and iOS. Cocoa and Cocoa Touch bindings are in place and ready to use. Under the hood Swift uses reference counting for garbage collection, and here lies a major pitfall; you should take care not to create any cyclic references, and/or know the difference between weak and unowned references. If you get this wrong, memory will leak just as it did in Obj-C. [Note that the same is true for Rust and Vala].
Swift lives in an Apple-only world, which should be no surprise—I suppose this compares to Microsoft’s strategy regarding Visual Basic, C#, .NET.
There is no doubt that Swift is going to be huge on iOS, and probably also on OS X. Nobody likes Obj-C (apart from some weird guys like me). The matter of truth is, Obj-C is outdated, it has just been obsoleted by Swift. Two years from now, no one will be writing new applications in Obj-C.
Vala
Last but not least, there is Vala, which has been around since 2006 already. Vala is a Java/C#/Mono-like language for developing GNOME applications. It is said Elementary OS’s main apps are built in Vala. The Vala compiler converts Vala code to plain C with GObject, which is in turn compiled by a generic C compiler. In a sense, Vala is just syntactical sugar, removing all the bad things that C has (the tedious task of programming intricate details), while keeping all the good (high performance).
Its syntax will be appealing to mostly Java and C# programmers. Personally, I get lost in the soup of keywords. A Vala source can be like a C++ code in disguise. There are just too many keywords; the designers forgot that less is more. It’s probably too late now, but my wish for Vala is to be stripped down, simplified, made easier to work with.
Nevertheless it is a great choice for developing GNOME applications, and there is Elementary OS to prove it. Currently it looks like Vala’s success is tied to that of GNOME, and it’s a bit of a shame because it deserves more attention from a broader audience.
Vala wins the prize for “Best chosen name for new programming language” simply because googling it lands you on the right pages right away.