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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

The programming language I want has:

* the philosophy of zig in terms of simplicity

* the thread and memory safe nature of Rust - without Rust's kitchen sink approach to adding sub languages and complexity

* the simplicity and straightforwardness of TypeScript

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I dont think this really exists.

Zig does have some memory safety, but not as much as Rust of course. I think Zig made the decision to add as much safety as they could, without crossing the complexity boundary. any further memory safety and you're about in Rust land. maybe some middle ground language is possible, but not one that I know of.

> any further memory safety and you're about in Rust land...

That's not quite true. We have GC using languages (some allow it to be turned off), and for many or in many use cases, that would be enough. Other languages like Lobster, Vlang, Vale, etc... are developing/putting out easier to use alternatives.

You are both right it seems. GP seems to have omitted withour GC. Number one on your list could be Dlang no? Not affiliated.

https://dlang.org/

Have you seen Vale? They're working on a new type of analyzer for memory errors, that apparently is simply and safer than Rust's [0].

[0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/first-regions-prototype

For me, Vale would need to be able to produce static executables the way Go does, without pulling in a kitchen sink of DNS and curl+dependencies type of libraries.

>> the simplicity and straightforwardness of TypeScript

This is a bit of a headscratcher. TS is a kludgy attempt at adding type safety to a dynamically-typed and expressive language.

Have you done much Ts programming?

It’s SO easy.

All programming languages should be this easy.

Easy != simple. I find it baffling how on one hand you like TypeScript for its "simplicity" while asking for a language with "the philosophy of zig in terms of simplicity".

TypeScript has more than enough complexity even without the npm ecosystem.

Typescript is not only not easy. It is also slow and ugly. The 2 cardinal sins of a programming language.

[[Insert off-by-one error joke here]]

If instead of Rust you'd take its close enough relative, OCaml, but without the GC and with more low-level machine access, maybe ATS would fit your bill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_%28programming_language%29

To my mind, BTW, Typescript is not that "straightforward" or "simple", but it has a pretty powerful type system, and I like that.

thanks for this, is there a way to get a good overview over more exotic languages?

When I look at Ocaml source code I feel like I’m reading mirror language.

Austral has been looking good to me as a potential "rust-lite". It's still in the very early stages though.

Golang?

But Golang's GC is tweakable. As a compiled language using a GC, it and others aren't that slow. Often fast enough, for many use cases.

If they literally mean safety then perhaps Golang fits the bill but they said safety _like Rust_. They probably still want the control that Rust provides.

Honestly simplicity and having syntax to teach a compiler how to reason about all the lifetimes you need in a real program are at odds.

I love rust but I think it's fundamentally complex

For sure, and I think different people may understate or overstate its complexity. It's definitely worse than Go but it's not nearly a field of landmines like C++. I think it's quite feasible to learn the basics in a short period of time, but maybe that's just me. I guess we'll see how Vale and the others turn out in production.

The high-level language I want is JS. For mid-level, something like C++ but with Rust's automatic typing and way fewer unnecessary features.

JavaScript, really?

I get the practical reasons why it’s useful, but I’m surprised it’s anyone’s choice for the design of a high level language. Is Python or Ruby not a much better choice?

Python's biggest inherent issue is it lacked async syntax for a long time. Haven't used the newer versions that have it, so idk how well it works. JS also has a way better package system and nicer syntax for objects and lambdas. Then the more practical issue is all the UI stuff integrates with JS rather than Py, and Py is even slower than JS.

Ruby, idk, never used or even encountered it. Python was my main language for a while.

The syntax points are fair, but the lack of standard library in JS complicates so many things. I'd contest the idea that the JS package ecosystem is better – there is more tooling, but I'm not sure the tooling is better, and the average package quality is easily the lowest in any ecosystem I've worked in.

I could see fully modern JS, without any transpilers, being an ok scripting language, I guess that's why React Native works well in that way.

Seems like Python projects (e.g. the top Py-based Github repos) always have Dockerfiles because they know pip+venv or whatever is notoriously finicky, whereas JS projects will rely safely on npm which is quite portable. After fighting with my Python packages for so long, JS was refreshingly easy.

For standard library, NodeJS keeps things pretty simple server-side. It's messier client-side with browser standards, but it's getting better, and Python can't even run in-browser. I like how JS evolves more gradually than Py which had the hard 2->3 transition.

(But Py does have some nice features I miss in JS like generators and list/dict comp, making it overall nicer for data science type things.)

My primary languages are Python and JS/TS.

I have to say I really prefer TS.

I know Python has types now but it doesn’t feel as good as TS.

Somehow neither of them do the kind of automatic typing Rust has, I guess cause they were both bolted on.

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