[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/30/2022 10:34 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 1/30/22 08:36, VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
>> In article <st4sup$gh9$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, Richard Maher 
>> <maher_rjSPAMLESS at hotmail.com> writes:
>>> On 28/01/2022 4:08 am, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>> On 1/27/2022 2:31 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>> So what programming language would you use for a new userland tool 
>>>>> on VMS
>>>>> if you couldn't use Pascal ? As far as I can see, it's only C or maybe
>>>>> C++.
>>>>
>>>> I believe Basic would be a lot better than C.
>>>
>>> And COBOL is the besterest.
>>>
>>> And if you can program some MACRO then you need a Garbage Collect to
>>> cover up yor lack of skill in managing memory.
>>
>> I've never needed "garbage collection" and I've written some very 
>> large and complex
>> products all in Macro!
> 
> I have to admit I really didn't get this one either.  I have worked
> with a lot of assemblers and written a number of programs in them
> and have never had a problem with garbage collection.  Memory leaks
> seem to be much more of a problem with higher level languages

That seems very plausible.

Assembler programmers are probably at average significant better
than the average of all programmers.

More care has to be put into the assembler code for other reasons
which spill over to memory management.

Even though large assembler code bases exist then I believe
that the real large ones comparable to the X MLOC or XX MLOC
that exist in Cobol, C, C++, Java etc..

>                                                        and
> especially the newer language du jour.

What languages?

Most languages from the last 30 years use GC.

Python use GC (reference count based).

Java, Kotlin, Scala and Groovy use GC (reachable based).

JavaScript use GC (reachable based).

C# and VB.NET use GC (reachable based).

PHP use GC (reference count based).

Swift use GC (reference count based).

Go use GC (reachable based).

Only Rust does not use GC, but its very unusual ownership
concept solve the same problem.

Arne