IssueRaiser

> Building an in-house compiler rarely makes sense.

> Building an in-house compiler rarely makes sense. I disagree. First of all, Wasabi solved a real problem which doesn't exist anymore: customers had limited platform support available and Fog Creek needed to increase the surface area of their product to cover as many of the disparate platforms as possible. Today, if all else fails, people can just fire up an arbitrarily configured VM or container. There is much less pressure to, for example, make something that runs on both ASP.NET and PHP. We are now in the fortunate position to pick just one and go for it. Second, experimenting with language design should not be reserved for theoreticians and gurus. It should be a viable option for normal CS people in normal companies. And for what it's worth, Wasabi might have become a noteworthy language outside Fog Creek. There was no way to know at the time. In hindsight, it didn't, but very few people have the luxury of designing a language which they know upfront will be huge. For example, Erlang started out being an internal tool at just one company, designed to solve a specific set of problems. Had they decided that doing their own platform was doomed to fail, the world would be poorer for it today.

Posted by Udo on Jun 25, 2015, 4:20 PM

Tags

Related issues

Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.5,500 issues0 comments

reliability (Software)

> Building an in-house compiler rarely makes sense.

UdoJun 25, 2015, 4:20 PM

> Building an in-house compiler rarely makes sense. I disagree. First of all, Wasabi solved a real problem which doesn't exist anymore: customers had limited platform support available and Fog Creek needed to increase the surface area of their product to cover as many of the disparate platforms as possible. Today, if all else fails, people can just fire up an arbitrarily configured VM or container. There is much less pressure to, for example, make something that runs on both ASP.NET and PHP. We are now in the fortunate position to pick just one and go for it. Second, experimenting with language design should not be reserved for theoreticians and gurus. It should be a viable option for normal CS people in normal companies. And for what it's worth, Wasabi might have become a noteworthy language outside Fog Creek. There was no way to know at the time. In hindsight, it didn't, but very few people have the luxury of designing a language which they know upfront will be huge. For example, Erlang started out being an internal tool at just one company, designed to solve a specific set of problems. Had they decided that doing their own platform was doomed to fail, the world would be poorer for it today.

Comments (0)

No comments yet. Start the discussion.

Comment on this issue