[fpc-pascal] Fwd: What to do to get new users

[Nikolay Nikolov]

On 10/19/24 5:53 PM, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal wrote:
> On Oct 19, 2024 at 9:37:49 PM, Nikolay Nikolov via fpc-pascal 
> <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
>> Counterexample 1: The growth of Rust.
>
> which is the opposite of Pascal, total memory safety. Rust is one of 
> the reasons that show people don’t want bug prone manual memory 
> management anymore.
And totally the same as Pascal in the lack of garbage collection. Your 
second sentence is inaccurate. It should be: Rust is one of the reasons 
that show people don't want C++-style memory management anymore. Rust 
was developed by Mozilla to replace their C++ code base. The original 
goal was to rewrite Mozilla's browser engine in Rust. This plan was, 
however, abandoned, so in a way, Rust has failed in achieving its 
original goal. However, most Rust developers come from C++ background, 
not Pascal. The problem with Rust is it imposes a memory model (a simple 
linear passing of memory ownership), that is not suitable for a lot of 
software projects. My impression is that Rust programs are more bug 
prone, compared to C and C++ programs. This could be explained by the 
fact that the language is new, and thus, it contains a lot of new code, 
and new code is less well tested and contains more bugs. However, from 
my experience from writing Rust, I'm of the opinion, that Rust's so 
called "memory safety" guarantees don't result in less buggy code. In 
fact, the constraints of the borrow checker force people to use design 
patterns that introduce whole classes of other bugs. I can talk about it 
for hours, giving concrete examples, but it would be off-topic for this 
list.
>
>>
>> Counterexample 2: Pascal is also growing.
>
> Then why are we talking about new users? I thought Pascal was getting 
> smaller every year.

Your impression that Pascal was getting smaller was not supported by 
evidence. On the contrary, download statistics were provided, showing 
that the number of Free Pascal downloads has been increasing in the past 
10 (or 20? I forgot the exact number) years.

Of course, that's not a reason not to make improvements that attract new 
users, but they need to be grounded in reality, instead of fantasy.

>
>>
>> Counterexample 3: The amount of C and C++ code your computer is running.
>>
>> GC is only used as the top "scripting" layer, everything else is C++. 
>> Every pixel that you see on your screen, every animation, all of this 
>> is done by C or C++ code. Rewriting all of this in a GC'd "memory 
>> safe" language will result in your computer becoming slow as a snail. 
>> Moore's law has been dead for some time, so this situation is here to 
>> stay.
>>
> I think FPC is closest to C++ in spirit but less powerful and easier 
> to use. That’s maybe where new users could from.

Easier to use, yes. Less powerful in what way? Where new users are 
coming from is an interesting question, actually worthy of a survey. 
Maybe we should do one?

Nikolay
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