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Comment by treebog | Hacker News Reader

It’s on the far bleeding edge as far as languages go, so I doubt any businesses use it. The largest practical ATS program I know of is polyglot: https://github.com/vmchale/polyglot

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Rust seems very popular despite also being bleeding edge. I am surprised there isn't more public industry interest in ATS, it looks very principled and well designed.

ATS seems like a "Worse is Better" approach to dependent types and linear types. It exposes all of their power at the type level, and the value level allows both ML-style high level programming and C-level bit-banging. That's really useful for

Yet to actually use that power, developers are pretty much left to implement everything themselves.

The nice thing about Rust's borrow-checking approach is that common patterns can be inferred and checked. Linear types ATS offer the same power, but force developers to jump through more hoops 'manually' (and likewise for dependent types, compared to the fancy inference/proof-search approaches of languages like Idris)

Thanks for the descriptive answer mate. I honestly don't know much about it. But I've read about the LISP family and ML family of languages. There are too many to choose from. I've decided to learn F# and have been going through some tutorials. I'm enjoying it quite a lot. ATS sounds like a good combo of abstraction meets bare metal.

Thanks man. It's difficult to keep track as I've seen so many new languages on HN. This one seemed like an important one.

The ATS compiler is also written in ATS.

How do you bootstrap the ATS compiler from source if you don't have binaries?

There is more than one compiler: http://www.ats-lang.org/Implements.html

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