2004-10-09 · in Ideas · 163 words

I'd like to be able to use occam as a decent systems programming language on Linux. It's got a number of advantages besides the obvious CSP stuff: it's got a decent compiler, so it's more efficient than most of the scripting languages; it's got proper array bounds detection; it's got pretty nice syntax (in my opinion, anyway); it's got well-defined cross-platform fixed-size types; it makes doing low-level maths very straightforward.

It's currently lacking a bit in bindings, though. The blocking system calls stuff and sockets interface covers a lot of common things, but it'd be nice to have an "occamish" way of firing off and managing external processes, and some ready-made adaptors between occam channels and Unix fds (particularly making use of mobile data), and a good way of handling command-line arguments. Once we've got channel interfaces for fds, it'd also be nice to have a compiler flag to make the top-level process's arguments be those instead of the existing non-8-bit-clean CHAN BYTEs...