The New Native Languages

To many developers, the recent trend of reversion to true compiled languages implies a re-engagement with C and C++, or for denizens of smaller niches, a renewed embrace for Pascal, Fortran, Ada, and other languages of the pre-2000 era. But for some programmers, this native trend, which is most heavily touted by Microsoft as part of its re-engagement for C++, leaves a certain sense of dissatisfaction. C and C++ look a lot like they did in 1995. And even though C11 and C++11 have added useful features that we have been carefully chronicling in Dr. Dobb's, the languages can have the feel of a past era onto which contemporary elements have been grafted.

                              For developers who yearn for something more modern, languages that reflect current concepts of parallelism, immutability, large libraries, extended data types, and the like there are interesting alternatives; especially since many of them key off the basic C syntax, which makes them comparatively easy to adopt. Chief among these are D (from Digital Mars), Go (from Google), Rust (from Mozilla), and Vala (from Gnome). All four languages are available free and all but D are completely open source. (D is almost completely open source). Looking at these languages provides interesting insights in language design and shows in some ways what C and C++ are lacking.