[bitc-dev] Is BitC dead?

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/11/14 Jesse Robinson <robynson at gmx.com>:
> During the course of my hobby OS research I was excited to stumble upon BitC. I wanted to write my own kernel, from scratch, just for the fun of it, but I didn't want to use C. What was the point? It had all been done before: see Unix, Linux, Mach, etc. C++ was out; too complicated, messy, ugly, just blah. I looked at D (and I'm still looking) but it seems to be heading down the wrong path, even though one of it's core principles is being a practical language. It now has heaps and heaps of keywords, three competing compilers, and two competing standard libraries. Around the same time I bought myself a book about programming in Haskell and absolutely feel in love with the type system and the clean syntax. Wouldn't it be awesome, I thought, if there was a language that had something like Haskell's type system and type classes, the clutter free syntax of python, and the low-level power of C. Then I stumbled upon BitC.
>
> It looked like the language I was looking for. Thinks started to look up. But then I read about Jonathan Shapiro's departure to Microsoft and the the halting of the development of BitC. I'm not a language guru by any means (not the best programmer in town either) so I don't think I could contribute much to the project in any meaningful way. Having said that all that, I'd hate to see BitC die an early death. So my question is:
>
> Is BitC pretty much dead?

I would say it was never really lively to start with.

As far as I know it was written for a single project (Coyotos) and
never used for anything else.

Unless somebody picks it up and uses it elsewhere it will likely die a
quiet lonely death as many obscure pieces of fine software did.

Thanks

Michal