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Comment by Casperin | Hacker News Reader

You can? Imperative, strong type system (no null, adts), reasonably fast, compiles to a single binary. I'm genuinely interested.

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Kotlin has null safety, and there are plenty of ways to turn jvm into a binary

It has no adts at all. Like I'm reading blog posts right now about how to do what should be the simplest thing

    enum Foo {
        A(String),
        B(i32),
    }

And it's.. not simple. And even if you manage to do it, it'll never be how Kotlin was meant to be written.

I agree with you 100%. It's the thing I miss most when not writing Rust. I will say that it as a feature alone isn't a good enough reason for me to write Rust, though!

Its pretty simple:

    sealed interface Foo
    class A(val s: String): Foo
    class B(val b: Int): Foo

Go fits all of those, so does Ada.

go doesn't have null safety or adts though? (sum types)

I think you can have null safety in Go and you certainly can have adts.

But even then, what about Ada?

I’m also not an expert, but I assume between C#/Typescript/haskell/swift that you can find all those things in many GC/safer languages.

Go does not have compile-time null safety or sum types :)

    foo := Foo{"hello"}
    fooPointer := &foo
    fooPointer = nil
    fmt.Println(fooPointer.Bar)
    > panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference

In a language like Kotlin a compile time error would prevent `fooPointer.Bar`, and in Rust `nil` does not exist. Go also does not have sum types, see for instance https://making.pusher.com/alternatives-to-sum-types-in-go/

Yes, Ada. Maybe. I will have to look at it.

The rest all are missing basic things. Like, I love TS, but it's absolutely bonkers because js is js. I once worked on a 250k loc project of js/ts, and we had nothing but trouble

I've used Go for almost two years on a side project and its type system is exactly why I'm doing Rust now. In my book, it is not okay that I add a new field to a struct and then nothing happens. No compile warnings, nothing. It's just assumed that I then wanted the zeroth value whenever it's created. ... And no adts. You just can't make something as simple as

    enum Foo {
        Bar(String),
        Baz(i32),
    }

Why? It's such a fundamental thing to be able to say "this piece of data is either this or that.. and then have the compiler tell you if you missed a case.

Ada is on my list of languages to look at. I'm cautiously optimistic about that one. But would you pick that over Rust as the simpler alternative? "Look guys! We're not moving fast enough with Rust because nobody seems to be proficient in it. Let's go with Ada instead!" .. I jest, but I will check it out and I really hope it hits the sweet spot for me

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