Group: Software/research/ProgrammingLanguages

Introduction

The goal of this page is to understand the status of various programming languages and toolchains. It can help people deciding on a programming language to choose or to learn, or enable people to understand where distributions need contributions to support well a language.

It could also contain information on what language works where or if we can target specific operating systems with free software or not.

Toolchain status

Compilers features and languages

Language	Autoconf	Automake	Libtool^[1]	GCC 13 support^[2]	Other free compilers	Shared libraries^[3]	Microcontrollers^[4]	Strict specifications^[5]
Ada				Yes^[6]		Yes	GCC^[7]	Yes^[8]
C	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes^[6]	cc65 clang dev86 mes tcc sdcc	defaults to shared libraries	GCC, SDCC	Drafts are available gratis, probably not under free licenses.^[9]
C++	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes^[6]		defaults to shared libraries	GCC, other?	?
D				Yes^[6]			?
Erlang	Yes			No^[6]				?
Fortran	Fortran 77, Fortran 90, Fortran 95	Fortran 77, Fortran 9x	Fortran, Fortran 77	Yes^[6]				?
GNU C	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes^[6]	clang^[10] tcc	defaults to shared libraries	GCC	Documented under the GFDL.^[11]
Go	basic support for gccgo	no^[12]	Yes	Yes^[6]			?
Java		with CGJ	with CGJ	No^[6]^[13]			?
Objective-C	Yes	Yes		Yes^[6]				?
Objective-C++	Yes	Yes		Yes^[6]				?
Rust	No	No	No	Work in progress^[6]				No^[14]
Unified Parallel C.		partial		No^[6]				?
Vala		partial		valac uses GCC	valac		depends on glib	?

Compilers bootstraping

Compiler	Languages	Dependencies
gcc-ada	Ada	Depends on gcc-ada
nim	nim	nim depends on itself but translated C files are provided by upstream
valac	vala	valac depends on itself but translated C files are provided by upstream

Interpreters features and languages

Language	Interpreter	Dependencies	Microcontrollers^[4]	Strict specifications^[5]
Perl	Perl	C, some C libraries	No	No^[15]
Python	CPython	C, some C libraries	No	?
Python	MicroPython	C, some C libraries	Yes	?

Build system status

Build system	Cross compilation	Easy to support in distributions	Targets
Autotools	Yes	Yes	Most Posix-like systems^[16]. Windows support possible, but it requires special care^[17].
setup.py	?	Yes

Didstributions status

Guix status

Guix is the most strict FSDG compliant distribution with regard to languages support: it requires the bootstrap process to be reproducible.

While there are still binary compilers being used in the bootstrap process for some languages, other languages are completely bootstrapped from source.

Language	Toolchain	GNU/Hurd i586	GNU/Linux armv7h	GNU/Linux aarch64	GNU/Linux i686	GNU/Linux mips64el	GNU/Linux powerpc	GNU/Linux powerpc64le	GNU/Linux riscv64	GNU/Linux x86_64	Mingw i686	Mingw x86_64
Ada	No
C	gcc-toolchain	Yes	Yes	Yes	Bootstraped from source with a 25 MiB Guile binary.^[18]	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Bootstraped from source with a 25 MiB Guile binary^[18]	Yes	Yes
C#	No
Haskell	ghc	No	No	No	Bootstrapped from generated C code^[19]	No	No	No	No	Bootstrapped from generated C code^[19]	No	No
Java	openjdk	?	?	?	bootstraped from source^[20]	?	?	?	?	bootstraped from source^[20]	?	?
nim		?	?	?	Bootstrapped from generated C code^[21]	?	?	?	?	Bootstrapped from generated C code^[21]	?	?
Rust	rustc	No^[22]	No^[22]	Bootstrapped from source with mrustc^[22]	No^[22]	No^[22]	No^[22]	No^[22]	Bootstrapped from source with mrustc^[22]	Bootstrapped from source with mrustc^[22]	No^[22]	No^[22]
vala	valac	?	?	?	Bootstrapped from generated C code^[23]	?	?	?	?	Bootstrapped from generated C code^[23]	?	?

Parabola status

Parabola has a policy which requires all the packages to be built from source. But it doesn't have a policy to reduce the size of the bootstrap binaries, so there can be circular dependencies.

Language	Toolchain	GNU/Linux armv7h	GNU/Linux i686	GNU/Linux x86_64
Ada	gcc-ada	No	Yes	Yes
C	gcc-toolchain	Yes	Yes	Yes
C#	mono	Yes	Yes	Yes
Haskell	ghc	No	Yes	Yes
Java	openjdk	Yes	Yes	Yes
nim		Yes	Yes	Yes
Ruby		Broken due to missing rubygems		Yes^[24]
Rust	rustc	Yes	Yes	Yes
Vala	valac	Yes	Yes	Yes

Trisquel 11 (aramo)

Language	Toolchain	amd64	arm64	armhf	ppc64el
Ada	gcc-ada	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
C#	mono	Yes^[25]	Yes^[25]	Yes^[25]	Yes^[25]
Haskell	ghc	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Standalone toolchains

Programming languages

Distributor

Release

Host

Target

Source code review

Ada

Adacore

2021^[26]

GNU/Linux (i686?)

ARM ELF 32bit

Source^[27]	License^[28]
als-2021-20210701-19A88-src.tar.gz
alt-ergo-for-spark-2021-20210518-19982-src.tar.gz
antlr-3.4-complete.jar
aunit-2021-20210518-19DC5-src.tar.gz
aws-2021-20210518-19F65-src.tar.gz
bb-runtimes-2021-20210518-19CE8-src.tar.gz
binutils-2.33.50s-2021-20210518-19EF2-src.tar.gz	GPL 3+
colibri-2021-20210518-19CDE-src.tar.gz
cvc4-2021-20210518-19B60-src.tar.gz
expat-2.2.6.tar.bz2	Expat
gcc-10-2021-20210519-19A74-src.tar.gz	GPL 3+
gcc-interface-10-2021-20210519-19A75-src.tar.gz
gdb-10-2021-20210518-19C88-src.tar.gz	GPL 3+
gmp-6.1.2.tar.bz2	LGPL 3+
gnat-2021-20210519-19A70-src.tar.gz
gnatcoll-bindings-2021-20210518-19B15-src.tar.gz
gnatcoll-core-2021-20210518-19ADF-src.tar.gz
gnatmem-2021-20210518-19F7B-src.tar.gz
gnatsymbolize-2021-20210518-19D3B-src.tar.gz
gprbuild-2021-20210519-19A34-src.tar.gz
gps-2021-20210701-19B6B-src.tar.gz
langkit-2021-20210518-19B8E-src.tar.gz
libadalang-2021-20210518-199BE-src.tar.gz
libadalang-tools-2021-20210519-19A69-src.tar.gz
libantlr3c-3.4.tar.gz	Modified BSD
libffi-3.2.1-patched.tar.gz	Expat
libiconv-1.15.tar.gz	LGPL 3+
mpc-1.0.3.tar.gz	LGPL 3+
mpfr-3.1.5.tar.bz2	LGPL 3+
opam-ocaml-4-11-1-2021-20210518-19D84-src.tar.gz	LGPL 3, It's a package manager for OCaml, so its repository may need to be reviewed as well.
spark-2021-2021-20210519-19A1A-src.tar.gz
spawn-2021-20210701-19A43-src.tar.gz
sqlite-autoconf-3270200.tar.gz
vss-2021-20210701-198AA-src.tar.gz
why3-2021-20210519-19ADF-src.tar.gz
xmlada-2021-20210518-19D50-src.tar.gz	LGPL 2.1
xz-5.2.2.tar.gz	GPL 2+, LGPL 2.1+
z3-2021-20210518-1A000-src.tar.gz	Expat
zlib-1.2.6.tar.gz	Zlib

GNU/Linux i686

GNU/Linux x86_64

RISCV ELF 32bit

GNU/Linux x86_64

RISCV ELF 64bit

GNU/Linux x86_64

References

↑ libtool is part of the autotools and it abstracts linking to make it work on a lot of operating systems. The status of the programming languages other than C and C++ can be found here: https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libtool.html#Tags
↑ Compared with other compilers like LLVM and rustc, GCC supports many CPU architectures and it's quite well integrated with various other software (gdb, gprof, build systems, etc). It also has long term support in mind as it continues to support other programming language standards. It also has good documentation that explain how it handles C code for instance. In addition it's a GNU project, so it has users freedom in mind. In addition Guix has made GCC bootstrapable from a binary that is less than 1KB, and it doesn't require huge resources to build or bootstrap.
↑ Shared libraries systems enable way better performances on older computers as it uses way less RAM.
↑ ^4.0^4.1 Can we compile and/or run code for/on microcontrollers, if so which compilers/interpreters are used / necessary for that.
↑ ^5.0^5.1 Having a standard or something similar to refer to enables people to write code that can still be used without requiring too much maintenance to adapt to newer compiler versions.
↑ ^6.00^6.01^6.02^6.03^6.04^6.05^6.06^6.07^6.08^6.09^6.10^6.11^6.12 https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-13.2.0/gcc/G_002b_002b-and-GCC.html
↑ At the FOSDEM 2023 I was told at the Ada table that it worked fine on microcontrollers with 16k of RAM, and that it was widely used in microcontrollers. The table also had several microcontroller boards.
↑ The ISO standard specification can be found here. It is provided by the ARG (Ada Rapporteur Group) free of charge and the license allows for modifications and reproductions while requiring the license to be reproduced.
↑ Ideally the specifications should be available under free licenses.
↑ https://clang.llvm.org/features.html#gcccompat
↑ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/
↑ While automake isn't supported, it's still possible to use it if we add a rule to handle .go files in our Makefile.am. For some reasons we then also need to add link rules for every program/library we create. I've created a autotools-go-hello-world project to show how to use autoconf and automake together with go. Note that I didn't look if that scaled well or the limitations in more complex projects. For instance I'm unsure how to handle shared libraries, how to link to dependencies, etc.
↑ The last GCC version supporting GCJ seems to be 6.5.0: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-6.5.0/gcc/G_002b_002b-and-GCC.html#G_002b_002b-and-GCC
↑ See one of the two talks on rust in GNU cauldron 2022.
↑ From Wikipedia article on perl: "No written specification or standard for the Perl language exists for Perl versions through Perl 5"
↑ Autotools contains *a lot* of information and/or workarounds on how to support most Posix-like systems, including less well known systems. See the [1] and automake manuals for more details.
↑ https://autotools.info/libtool/windows.html
↑ ^18.0^18.1 https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down
↑ ^19.0^19.1 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/haskell.scm?h=v1.4.0#n363
↑ ^20.0^20.1 In gnu/packages/java.scm icedtea-7 depends on jamvm which depends on jamvm-1-bootstrap which is built from source. The source bootstrap is not architecture specific.
↑ ^21.0^21.1 Both the Guix package and the official build instructions use the build.sh script that compiles code (in the c_code directory) that has been generated with the nim compiler.
↑ ^22.00^22.01^22.02^22.03^22.04^22.05^22.06^22.07^22.08^22.09^22.10 See supported-systems in the rust 1.54 package definition
↑ ^23.0^23.1 The vala source code contains C files generated from vala source code that is also present in that source code. Since the Guix package and the README.md included in the vala source code require a C compiler but not a vala compiler to compile vala, the C code is then used to build it.
↑ There is now libre/ruby that works.
↑ ^25.0^25.1^25.2^25.3 mono-mcs is architecture independent. It depends on packages like mono-runtime which works on amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el.
↑ This release also had additional hosts like Windows and darwin, and additional targets too like "Raspberry Pi 2 Linux (32bits)" but I didn't look into them.
↑ Here we used GNU/Linux x86_64 host and target source code for the review. I hope that all the host/target combination have the same source but I didn't check.
↑ So far I used 'guix package --show=<package-name>' to find the license. I also didn't check license compatibilities.

[libtool-1] tool is part of the autotools and it abstracts linking to make it work on a lot of operating systems. The status of the programming languages other than C and C++ can be found here: https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libtool.html#Tags

[2] Compared with other compilers like LLVM and rustc, GCC supports many CPU architectures and it's quite well integrated with various other software (gdb, gprof, build systems, etc). It also has long term support in mind as it continues to support other programming language standards. It also has good documentation that explain how it handles C code for instance. In addition it's a GNU project, so it has users freedom in mind. In addition Guix has made GCC bootstrapable from a binary that is less than 1KB, and it doesn't require huge resources to build or bootstrap.

[shared-libraries-3] Shared libraries systems enable way better performances on older computers as it uses way less RAM.

[microcontrollers-4] 4.0^4.1 Can we compile and/or run code for/on microcontrollers, if so which compilers/interpreters are used / necessary for that.

[strict-specifications-5] 5.0^5.1 Having a standard or something similar to refer to enables people to write code that can still be used without requiring too much maintenance to adapt to newer compiler versions.

[gcc-supported-languages-6] 6.00^6.01^6.02^6.03^6.04^6.05^6.06^6.07^6.08^6.09^6.10^6.11^6.12 https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-13.2.0/gcc/G_002b_002b-and-GCC.html

[7] At the FOSDEM 2023 I was told at the Ada table that it worked fine on microcontrollers with 16k of RAM, and that it was widely used in microcontrollers. The table also had several microcontroller boards.

[8] The ISO standard specification can be found here. It is provided by the ARG (Ada Rapporteur Group) free of charge and the license allows for modifications and reproductions while requiring the license to be reproduced.

[9] Ideally the specifications should be available under free licenses.

[10] ttps://clang.llvm.org/features.html#gcccompat

[11] ttps://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/

[12] While automake isn't supported, it's still possible to use it if we add a rule to handle .go files in our Makefile.am. For some reasons we then also need to add link rules for every program/library we create. I've created a autotools-go-hello-world project to show how to use autoconf and automake together with go. Note that I didn't look if that scaled well or the limitations in more complex projects. For instance I'm unsure how to handle shared libraries, how to link to dependencies, etc.

[13] The last GCC version supporting GCJ seems to be 6.5.0: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-6.5.0/gcc/G_002b_002b-and-GCC.html#G_002b_002b-and-GCC

[14] See one of the two talks on rust in GNU cauldron 2022.

[15] From Wikipedia article on perl: "No written specification or standard for the Perl language exists for Perl versions through Perl 5"

[16] Autotools contains *a lot* of information and/or workarounds on how to support most Posix-like systems, including less well known systems. See the [1] and automake manuals for more details.

[17] ttps://autotools.info/libtool/windows.html

[reduced-binary-seed-manual-section-18] 18.0^18.1 https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down

[guix-ghc-4-19] 19.0^19.1 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/haskell.scm?h=v1.4.0#n363

[opejdk-bootstrap-20] 20.0^20.1 In gnu/packages/java.scm icedtea-7 depends on jamvm which depends on jamvm-1-bootstrap which is built from source. The source bootstrap is not architecture specific.

[nim-21] 21.0^21.1 Both the Guix package and the official build instructions use the build.sh script that compiles code (in the c_code directory) that has been generated with the nim compiler.

[rust-1.54-bootstrap-22] 22.00^22.01^22.02^22.03^22.04^22.05^22.06^22.07^22.08^22.09^22.10 See supported-systems in the rust 1.54 package definition

[vala-23] 23.0^23.1 The vala source code contains C files generated from vala source code that is also present in that source code. Since the Guix package and the README.md included in the vala source code require a C compiler but not a vala compiler to compile vala, the C code is then used to build it.

[24] There is now libre/ruby that works.

[mono-mcs-25] 25.0^25.1^25.2^25.3 mono-mcs is architecture independent. It depends on packages like mono-runtime which works on amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el.

[26] This release also had additional hosts like Windows and darwin, and additional targets too like "Raspberry Pi 2 Linux (32bits)" but I didn't look into them.

[27] Here we used GNU/Linux x86_64 host and target source code for the review. I hope that all the host/target combination have the same source but I didn't check.

[28] So far I used 'guix package --show=<package-name>' to find the license. I also didn't check license compatibilities.

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Group: Software/research/ProgrammingLanguages

Contents

Introduction

Toolchain status

Compilers features and languages

Compilers bootstraping

Interpreters features and languages

Build system status

Didstributions status

Guix status

Parabola status

Trisquel 11 (aramo)

Standalone toolchains

References

Campaigns

Get Involved