Author here - happy to answer any questions!
I seriously hope though that you will open source the compiler.
I can't see Dark going anywhere without a guarantee that you can use it without using the provided infrastructure and that your code will work fine even if Dark goes away or you decide to host it yourself.
I certainly won't touch Dark with a 10 foot pole otherwise. And would advise anyone against it strongly.
Dark can talk to other HTTP things, so many of the functions that are done by libraries can be done over HTTP. So you can call other services, even if we don't have an SDK for that yet. And from there it should be easy to package it up so there is an SDK.
Finally, it's a question of what you're doing. There's many tasks where the disadvantage of not having an ecosystem is outweighed by Dark's other advantages. And as we grow the ecosystem, the disadvantages go away, unlike the status quo tooling.
How did the decision to create a whole new language take place? Was using existing languages a serious consideration and if so, what were the trade-offs that made you go in this direction?
I'm familiar with the basics of back-ends. Let's say you had a language that compiles each back-end point into a binary executable (each api point is a separate program). All you'd need is versioning via directories, symlinks to the active most up to date version and a router that looks up the executables in a dir and routes to them.
Making changes would involve changing the code, pressing "deploy" which pushes to github and gets the backend to pull, re-compile the binaries and update symlinks.
Given this setup - what does your approach do that's more than what I've just described? I'm assuming there's some fundamental problem my naive approach does not handle that made you go in the direction that you've just described.
Presumably, we'd have to use Javascript as our basis cause everyone knows Javascript. But then we'd have people wanting "Dark for python" and "Dark for Ruby" and "Dark for rust", etc, which making a new language neatly sidesteps.
So if we built it for javascript, we'd need to decide how to support all of JS's features. How do we support eval? How do we support Typescript and Flow and ReasonML?
Then we'd be stuck with all the JS mistakes: promises and futures and callbacks and object model and null/undefined/0/"" comparison tables.
This list keeps going: it would have to use a parser. It would need to support npm, etc, etc.
I expect once people see Dark that they'll try to build similar features for existing languages, and I hope they succeed! There's some companies that are doing similar things, and I think the scale of their vision is much lower, partially because they are limited by language choice.
What are the fundamental features of Dark that are not possible to add to an existing language?
What are the fundamental features of an existing language that are not possible to restrict via enforcing a subset, that are fundamental to Dark?
Is Dark a very domain specific language?
Perhaps these questions will better be answered by a demo that is coming in September.
An obvious example is the structured editor. To do that, we have to have a language in which there is a meaning to every incomplete program. Other languages don't have that - they just have a syntax error.
Our editor shows you what we call "live values" as you type. If you've seen lighttable, it's a similar idea. We save real values from production and use it an a sorta debugger. It's really wild, makes understanding code really easy, and debugging too.
How would we handle that in JS? No idea, might be possible by hacking into v8. But even then, we actually needed to change the language semantics and require all functions to be marked as "pure" or "impure". And then we discovered there's a 3rd state: "non-side-effecting but we don't have a version of it in the client". And then a 4th state "not idempotent but we can it without side-effects".
I doubt there's anything that _couldnt_ be done in Js or ruby or python, but what's the point in fighting that battle? By controlling the entire thing we avoid all this.
Same as why we don't support vim. Could we make all the cool stuff we're doing work in vim? Sure, with a massive massive effort. Blank slates work better for this.
I don't know if you can convince people to do it, but I'm glad somebody's trying.
The UI is just not thought out at all. I don't think I'm being resistant to change. I think their IDE is just garbage.
Some people have done new IDEs well, VSCode comes to mind. But replicating 40 years of features is not going to happen overnight, and some of those features are actually important. Figuring out which ones are the key. If you don't hit a developer's critical set of features, they aren't going to use your thing.
And the reason 1d text is hard to get rid of is not merely an editor (ie, an "app") but a galaxy of languages, tools, and operating systems built around 1d character streams. Everything from the serial driver to the style sheet can be manipulated with primatives for mapping, filtering, and composing character streams and operations on them.
There ARE a bunch of benefits to structured code, for example Docker and npm/pip/etc have recently showed us a hint of what composition of standard components can bring.
What might be missing from structured code is the rest of the primitives on ASTs. Once we have all that we can talk about backporting to emacs :)
Maybe the editor should be customisable via Dark itself?
Alternatively, allow us to use our editor-of-choice and provide a language server to facilitate the creation of structured editing plugins for Dark.
I would add that most applications, including most non-vi-or-emacs editors and web browsers, do not allow much customisation of how their input is mapped to actions in the software. For someone like me, a person that is a vi die-hard because of its ergonomics, this is absolutely critical. Post-input customisation, no matter how advanced, cannot satisfy this need.
That's the plan!