I’d like you folks not to blindly quote demeaning statements like these. Alien has a very different take on the problem, one that has yet to prove that it can gain wide acceptance largely because it throws abstractions out of the window and goes straight to the metal. The recent issues that JMM has seen when porting Alien to PPC shows that they cannot be blindly ignored and Alien is adding “bloat” as we speak.

By the end of the day it remains to be seen whether it is more useful to add abstractions in the signatures (as the FFI does, which is currently available on at least six architectures) or whether it is advantageous to go to the bare metal (as Alien does, which is currently available on 1.5 architectures). And until this has been decided I think it behooves everyone not to call each other names.

Thanks,
– Andreas