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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

This looks promising. We haven't seen a lot of new languages lately that could turn into viable alternatives to C. Muon binaries don't seem to have a runtime or other dependencies so it looks like a module written in Muon can be statically linked into an existing C/C++ project. Pretty cool.

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Yes, one of the goals for Muon is to make it easy to use Muon code from another language.

There's a recent wave of new languages in the same spirit as Muon, like Zig, Kit, Jai and V (the last two have not yet been released). But since they all have no/minimal runtime, it should be relatively easy to reuse libraries between them.

I noticed Rust was not your list of languages. Is Rust fundamentally different then these languages? If so, why?

Ah, good question. Rust could definitely be in that list as well! It's a more mature language (so that's why I didn't mention it in the list), but conceptually it very much fits.

Seeing the original list, my guess was that it was no gc, with a small runtime - and the immediate question then was - how is this different/better than "D as a better C"?

The main difference is simplicity. D has a lof of features, like classes, inheritance, exceptions, properties, etc. Muon is a much simpler language that specifically avoids all of those things.

Rust aims for (mostly) memory safely which none of the others do. As a result it is way more complicated and rather different from them.

I think that is a very good design choice. Failing at that was one of the big catastrophes with C++.

Have you seen Nim?

I've used it for some hobby projects a year or two ago. Unfortunately the compiler was very unstable back then and linking Nim into existing projects turned out to be pretty painful, in part because of the gc/threading model.

There is a lot to like about Nim, but I think it tries to do too much.

I second taking a look at Nim: https://nim-lang.org/

Some people will argue it isn't a contender for C though since it defaults to using garbage collection.

But you can turn off the GC and use it as a ‘better C’ (Nim supports raw pointers by the way.) Although you have to ditch most of Nim’s standard library, you can still import C libraries, including libc (I’ve heard you can also do this for the D language.)

Only part of the stdlib depends on GC. Also the GC runs independently in each thread and can work with deadlines, making it harmless in most use-cases.

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