Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: In-place modification

On 10/07/07, Aaron Denney wrote:

On 2007-07-10, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:

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On 10/07/07, Andrew Coppin wrote:

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Sebastian Sylvan wrote:

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On 10/07/07, Alex Queiroz wrote:

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So you think we use C because we like it? :-) When this revolutionary tool of yours arrive that compiles Haskell to PIC devices, I'm gonna be the first to use it.

No, you use it because you have to, there is very little choice. Which is exactly my point.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that when nobody uses C for desktop applications, games etc. anymore because there's a better language available and widely supported, that some version of this "next mainstream language" will make it onto embedded devices too.

The revolution (tm) won't come at the same time for all domains. C is probably used/supported in embedded devices mostly because it's popular for non-embedded devices (not because C is somehow uniquely suited for embedded devices). So what happens when something else is popular, when most industries have stopped using C and almost nobody coming from university knows it very well or at all? Isn't it likely that a lot of vendors will write compilers targeting embedded devices for this new popular language?

Mmm... a garbage-collected language on a PIC with single-digit RAM capacity? That's going to be fun! :-D

OTOH, isn't somebody out there using Haskell to design logic? (As in, computer ICs.) I doubt you'll even run "Haskell" on a PIC, but you might well use it to *construct* a program that works on a PIC...

Yeah, and 640K should be enough for everybody... Again, the original statement was about 20 years down the line. Go back 20 years and people would say similar things about C (comparing it to assembly).

And assembly is still widely used. Moore's law as applied to the embedded domain has a lot of the transistors going to more, cheaper devices, not bigger ones.

Depends on your definition of "widely used". You'll always need some low-level stuff at the bottom (e.g. for the page manager in an OS), and if your device is nothing but "the bottom", well then that's what you get. Doesn't mean that assembly isn't "dead" in the most reasonable sense of the word for the purposes of a discussion like this (i.e. nobody chooses to use assembly when they don't need to). And that's what I predict will happen (and already has in very many domains) with C. -- Sebastian Sylvan +44(0)7857-300802 UIN: 44640862