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What's Gont?

1   What's Gont?

Largely imperative composition of C-like lexical layer, control structures and speed with ML's typesystem, functions as first class citizens, and safety. Plus possibly few more things, like objects.

1.1   Safety

Gont is safe. This means that compiler shouldn't produce any code, execution of which would cause SEGV. Parse: it should not be possible to overflow buffers, mismatch types of arguments in calls and so on. However note, that SEGV can be obtained from playing with extern declaration, compiler has no means of validating.

1.2   Level of abstraction

Gont is very higher level language.

<evangelisation>

[...] And, actually, the more you can avoid programming in C the more productive you will be.

C is very efficient, and very sparing of your machine's resources. Unfortunately, C gets that efficiency by requiring you to do a lot of low-level management of resources (like memory) by hand. All that low-level code is complex and bug-prone, and will soak up huge amounts of your time on debugging. With today's machines as powerful as they are, this is usually a bad tradeoff -- it's smarter to use a language that uses the machine's time less efficiently, but your time much more efficiently. Thus, Python.

Eric S. Raymond
This is quotation from hacker howto by ESR :-). One may easily note that it does not only talk about Python.

</evangelisation>

1.3   Memory Management

Gont provides transparent memory management, along with garbage collection (the particular kind of garbage collector used is Boehm conservative garbage collector, used also by GCJ and Popcorn). It generally means you can allocate as much as you want, forget the pointers, and the Gont runtime system with get rid of unused memory.

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What's Gont?