[Cuis] Is Smalltalk right for my autonomous car? (was Re: Audio and Video Object Analysis)

[Frank Shearar]

On 18 December 2013 06:27, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe, maybe not. I'm less worried about the GC -- Ungar's generation
> scavenging algorithm is pretty good even in real time -- but in the rare
> cases where bugs can kill (and do feel free to stone me to death for saying
> so) I think the nuisance of type safety may outweigh the convenience and
> expressiveness of dynamic typing; anyway it often will matter to decision
> makers. The other thing that might be an issue is concurrency, but I think
> there are pretty straightforward ways of dealing this this.

GC's a bit of a red herring. First, it's not that big a problem for
almost all applications anyway, and second, people like Azul have
shown that you can built a real time GC (for Java, which means for
Scala and Clojure).

Type safety has nothing to do with GC (C#, Haskell, ML: statically
typed (far better than C++), and GC'd).

But if you're _that_ set against GC, use a linearly typed language and
(once your program compiles) you will have NO GARBAGE AT ALL to
collect. See Henry Baker's papers for details.

> It's all relative. I'd *much* rather my car drive itself using Smalltalk
> than C++! At least the arrays are bounds checked and we don't get memory
> leaks, protection faults, or (perhaps most chillingly!) buffer-overruns.

This!

> SecureSqueak is a thing. It's beyond my experience at present, but might be
> worth looking into if you are concerned about the safety of your end users!

SecureSqueak's something entirely different to _safety_. Also, it
looks very strongly like it's a dead-because-of-lack-of-time project.

frank