There are plenty of strongly typed memory safe languages. In fact I think those ...

marcosdumay · on March 12, 2023

Yet, almost all the basic tools in a Unix system are written in C.

HervalFreire · on March 12, 2023

Of course the person you're replying to is talking about languages without a garbage collector. Systems languages with zero cost abstractions.

vips7L · on March 15, 2023

But why? There is nothing about a shell that requires zero cost abstractions or no gc. It farms all of its work out to other executables. A shell could be written in literally any language.

triyambakam · on March 12, 2023

I'm not really sure which other popular languages would be considered memory safe AND strongly typed. I know of both C and C++ which I wouldn't consider memory safe. And I know of Javascript, which is not strongly typed... so which do you mean?

vips7L · on March 12, 2023

Java, Scala, Kotlin, C#, D, Go, and TypeScript to name a few.

scns · on March 13, 2023

Of those only D and Go build self contained binaries (yes i know about Graal/Kotlin Native/.Net AOT). No snark intended.

vips7L · on March 13, 2023

This is moving the goal post a bit, since the person I replied to was considering JavaScript, but I don’t really think this distinction matters. You get most programs from a package manager.

I am curious though why you don’t count graal or .net aot? They are valid options to produce an aot binary and C# has been able to produce a self contained non-aot runtime for a long a time.

intelkishan · on March 13, 2023

Even Python fits the bill.