Most programming languages today fall into the paradigms of native machine code compiled ones like Rust, C, C++, etc or Bytecode compiled like Kotlin, Java, C#, etc. Even some interpreted languages like Python can be thought of as Bytecode compiled since the interpreter store the bytecode which is executed instead of the source file unless the source file is changed.
I think the main benefit of bytecode compiled programming languages is that they’re usually platform independent as long as there’s a runtime for the platform you want to use, but I also don’t know how much this matters anymore, or whether the inefficiencies of bytecode makes it worth it.
What do you think? Should new programming languages always be native machine code compiled, like Rust or C?
I think, they’ll coexist. Statically compiled languages will largely be used for things where latency matters and runtime-based languages will do most of the rest.
Because ultimately, hardware is relatively cheap, developer time isn’t. So, if you just need performance, don’t care for latency, you can very often solve that with stronger or more hardware.
I mean, right now we already have people happily launching a whole browser as their runtime, without even all too clear advantages from that, because they’re just not too worried about the disadvantages either.
And hardware will mostly just get stronger with time.
So, while I don’t think Rust’s handful of frills to make things work without a runtime are all too bad, the hurdle for people to jump to a runtime-based language is really low.