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?

  • Ephera
    2•3 years ago
    1. Easier Deploy-ability (We don’t have to rewrite our code as much to use existing extensions on deployed machine when runtime handles that for us.)

    I mean, instead of installing the runtime on the target machine, you could install a compiler there and compile it on the target machine.
    I know that we don’t really do that as an industry, but yeah, I never quite understood why we instead figured we should do general-purpose scripting languages.

    • @BlackCentipede@lemmy.ml
      1•3 years ago

      They basically did that with .Net Framework for the most part of Windows history. (It come pre-installed since Vista days.) There are a lot of differences between runtime-based programming languages compared to low level compiled language when you get to the meat of it. Reflection is superior on runtime-based languages than say C/C++, Rust, or DLang otherwise I would not be using C# anymore.