[Gluster-devel] Languages (was Re: Proposal for GlusterD-2.0)

[Jeff Darcy]

> Two characteristics of a language (tool chain) are important to me,
> especially
> when you spend a good part of your time debugging failures/bugs.
> 
> - Analysing core files.
> - Ability to reason about space consumption. This becomes important in
>   the case of garbage collected languages.
> 
> I have written a few toy programs in Go and have been following the language
> lately. Some of its features like channels and go routines catch my attention
> as we are aspiring to build reactive and scalable services. Its lack of
> type-inference
> and inheritance worries me a little. But, I shouldn't be complaining when
> our default choice has been C thus far ;)

If there's going to be complaining, now's the time.  Justin's kind of
right that we don't want to be adding languages willy-nilly.  If there's
something about a language which is likely to preclude its use in
certain contexts (e.g. GC languages in the I/O path) or impair our
long-term productivity, then that's important to realize.
Unfortunately, the list of such drawbacks for C isn't exactly
zero-length either.