Advances of the Hare programming language compared to C | Hacker News Reader

Advances of the Hare programming language compared to C

harelang.org

14 pointsgoranmoomin8 comments

I am the designer of this programming language. The project is not yet ready for broader distribution, and a disclaimer on the home page asks visitors to refrain from sharing the website. I have asked the mods to remove this link.

If anyone has questions, please email me in private: sir@cmpwn.com

Otherwise, your patience is appreciated. This project is not ready for public consideration at this time.

I’ve never heard of Hare before this. It looks pretty nice, actually.

I do wonder; why this instead of Zig?

Hare is technically an unreleased project. It was accidentally released here in the comments yesterday of another blog post by Drew (despite a big banner asking people not to link to the page for the time being).

I'm not saying this is the entire answer, but Drew has some issues with Zig https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15494222.

His issues (from 3.5 years ago):

"- The string handling is braindead"

How so? Not a lot of specificity here.

"- The compiler and stdlib is immature. This seems like the first programming language the guy has written. You should have a few failures to learn from before you make a Serious Programming Language imo."

The Hare compiler isn't immature? As noted, this was 3.5 years ago.

"- Code run at compile time is a neat idea but has a weird syntax and really really complicates the internals of the compiler and related tooling."

And yet this has become one of Zig's strongest points.

Maybe it has changed in the last 3 years, but "comptime" doesn't seem like such a "weird syntax" to me?

Re: strings, this is a thread about that topic: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/234

It strikes me as a difference in opinion wrt at which level should strings be handled (zig folks saying it should be a userspace/stdlib concern, ddevault saying it should be a core language concern). IMHO the point of contention seems to be that ddevault considers stdlib an integral part of a language, whereas zig has an ideology that aggressive support for freestanding, no-stdlib-whatsoever workflows is part of its scope.

From my understanding from the other HN thread, Hare appears to use QBE as a backend, which only targets x64 (whereas Zig says it'll continue to use LLVM for prod builds). Zig is also somewhat unique among low level languages in that it put quite a non-trivial amount of legwork on cross-compilation plumbing (e.g. the article about compiling C extensions for go via zig[0])

[0] https://dev.to/kristoff/zig-makes-go-cross-compilation-just-...

Since then Zig has come quite far in its self-hosted rewrite. So the point of it being Andrew's first compiler is no longer valid.

The front page of the project says:

> Please do not share this website with others until we believe it's ready for broader distribution.

Sure, it's accessible, but it doesn't really seem to be in good faith to directly ignore someone's explicit wishes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com