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Comment by chhs | Hacker News Reader

> Nothing else puts all of these ingredients together (compile-time macros, static typing, C-like speed, Ruby-like syntax, gem-like package ecosystem, native binary compilation, fibers, and cross-platform support)

Something I've noticed when reading 'X language is great' posts, the comparison is usually limited to a narrow subset of what's out there.

As an example, I think D meets all of the above criteria. Maybe I'll give on Ruby-like syntax, which D instead has more of a C-like syntax with adjustments to improve compile time.

There are lots of great languages out there and it really irritates me when I see claims of 'X is better than Y or Z' and it seems no effort is made to see what else already exists with the same (or greater) set of features.

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Native binary is not a clear statement. On Android is CPU-native, really native? Or is CLR the future of Windows? CPU-native does not mean much. It means that you have a competition of almost all languages, that have head start and better tooling.

"Is FFI cheap on all interesting platforms?" is a better question, than "Does it compile to CPU-native binary on all interesting platforms?". In this space you only kinda get some JVM languages, but on Windows you would have to do something more special. Scheme to some extent. Also Haxe.

If you don't care about it you can read the rest of this thread with all other favorite languages. I for one cheer for Myrddin, Pony and Zig.

I was thinking lately about an imperative language, that would be easily compiled to other first class languages. To serve as a cross-platform core of application. It would be quite limited - for example no heap allocations. Something maybe akin to Google's Wuffs language. Just an idea on the one edge of the problem.

Not only that, while ongoing Crystal efforts might be great, lets not forget it is a path already traced by the likes of Common Lisp, Dylan and Ruby motion.

So other that the gem-like package ecosystem and a syntax familiar to Ruby developers, it isn't particularly new.

This is the entire reason I got burned out on new languages.

I learned to minimize burns by looking at everything that comes out as learning process, there is always something that makes us better developers.

However for production code I only use the programming languages directly supported by platform owners.

Of course others rather take part in ramping up eco-systems and that is fine as well, otherwise we wouldn't get new toys adopted by platform owners.

True. I guess I mean that after a while I started classifying languages like this as "flavors of C". There are just so many languages that are fast, it's no longer a selling point.

Out of all of the languages I've read about the past few years, only 3 jumped out as bringing real value to the table compared to the other options that are already out there: Go, Rust and Elixir.

Could you elaborate about the value of Elixir, please? It's been on my radar for quite a while now.

So a lot has been written on this topic already. I would personally direct you to read this (on Erlang, but Elixir is basically Erlang with nicer syntax and a few added bits) - https://ferd.ca/the-zen-of-erlang.html

Fundamentally though, Erlang/Elixir is a language built from first principles to achieve reliability in concurrent, distributed contexts. It's quite unique in that regard. Even the language it's most directly compared to (Go, in having go channels that are sort of but not quite like Erlang/Elixir processes) is built instead from concurrency first, not reliability (and having concurrency flow out from that as a required feature).

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