Comment

Comment by tarblog

I would define the term "high-level language" to mean that it's possible to write programs in the language without needing to worry about the specific hardware that the program is running on.

I would consider systems programming to be things like writing operating systems, drivers, high-performance native applications (for many difference definitions of high-performance), and databases.

I consider rust to be a high-level language and I further consider it to be suitable for systems programming using my definitions.

However, I don't consider go to be suitable for a lot of systems programming tasks because it has a significant runtime system that includes a garbage collector. Just because they describe themselves as a "systems programming language" doesn't mean that I believe them (at least as far as I understand that term). That said, there are certain applications that work fine with GC, and in those cases it can be a very nice way to achieve memory safety without programmer burden.

parent tarblog 10 years ago

No comments yet

Be the first to share your thoughts.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton