Blogging, Suneido, and Programming Languages

Another blogger I follow has announced they are stopping blogging. It's sad (to me) how the world has shifted away from blogging. Of course, there are still active blogs, but far fewer than there were. I thought maybe the pandemic would give people time to do more blogging but it didn't seem to work that way. Of course, it always surprised me that smart productive busy people would take the time to write good blog posts.

I'm no exception. I post less and less often, other than photographs on my non-work blog. But even that is a shift from my past longer text posts. Readers have dwindled too. (Not that I ever had a big audience.)

But looking back through some of my blog posts, I'm glad I wrote them even if hardly anyone read them. It's a bit like a sporadic diary, but more thoughtfully written than a personal diary would be. I started blogging in 2005. It would have been interesting to go back farther but even in 2005 the tech world was a different place than today.

Thinking about this led me back here. I was writing a document for my staff, and some of it seemed of slightly more general interest so I thought I'd write about it.

Here's roughly when the versions of Suneido went into "production" (used by customers)

• 2000 cSuneido (C++)
• 2010 jSuneido (Java)
• 2020 gSuneido client (Go)
• 2022 gSuneido server
• 2022 suneido.js (browser client)

Two data points doesn't mean much, but it's interesting that it was roughly 10 years between the major versions. The concurrent release of suneido.js is because another programmer did the development. (I started it, but developing both gSuneido and suneido.js at the same time was too much.)

All three implementation languages (C++, Java, Go) were in their early stages when I started using them. I was lucky that all went on to become mainstream. Some of the other languages I considered, such as C#/.Net and Kotlin have also been successful. Scala and D not as much, although they're still around.

C++ is a fascinating language. But it's too complex and it's unsafe. Life is too short. (gSuneido does have some unsafe code to interface with Windows and it has been the source of the hardest bugs.)

Java has a world class runtime with a great garbage collector and JIT compiler. But the language itself is not really a good fit for low level systems programming. gSuneido, with a simple byte code interpreter and no JIT still manages to outperform jSuneido. If Project Valhalla ever gets released that will help. But it's been "coming soon" since 2014.

Go felt like a bit of a gamble at the time. The garbage collector wasn't very good and neither was performance. But the language was a good fit for implementing Suneido. And it seemed like Google was committed to it. Although I wish it was a little less of a one-company language.

One of the things that bugged me about Go was its lack of generics. But now that it has them, I don't really use them that much. The people that resisted generics would say "I told you so". But it did simplify certain kinds of code and I'm still glad to have it when I need it. 

I wish Go had better support for immutability. C++ and Java aren't much better but at least they have a little bit. Immutability (and pure functions) are one of the best tools to handle concurrency, and concurrency is supposed to be Go's strong point. I think there's potential for a conventional mainstream language with strong immutability. I realize there are functional languages with strong immutability, but so far they're not really mainstream.

The big thing these days is Rust, but Suneido is garbage collected, and unless you want to write your own garbage collector (no thanks, been there, done that) the implementation language also needs to be garbage collected.

As far as the Suneido language itself, I think it has stood the test of time reasonably well. It was never intended to be especially novel or original, although at the time object-oriented programming and dynamic languages were leading edge. There have been a few minor adjustments to the language, a bit of syntactic sugar here and there, but for the most part code written 20 years ago would still run today. There are a few things I'd change but overall, when I program in Suneido, there's not a lot I wish was different.