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Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone here have any experience with Koka? I've been following the language from afar for a while but I have yet to read an account of what it's like to use it in practice.

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I think that it is poised for rapid growth this year. I've been using it quite a bit, and once it gains a more comprehensive standard library, I think it will be much more useful in practice. Given the activity on GitHub, I would suggest checking back in a few months for a more out-of-the-box experience (it will still be a new language - but more ready to entertain serious projects). However, I would give it a try now if it looks interesting to you, install the VScode extension, look through some samples and leave some feedback on github.

As a side note, it has pretty great C interop, so you should be able to use C libraries or your own C code, for missing functionality. Documentation on this feature is unfortunately lacking right now though.

I've tried using it a bit. It works and it is fun to use, but there are quite a number of rough edges. I wouldn't use it in production yet, I don't think they are conservative there.

Last time I tried to use it (which was quite long ago), it barely had a print function, making it pretty much unusable.

It does have `print(ln)` for some time (when I have tried it for the first time) now.

It is self-proclaimed as a "research Language" on the homepage, which has kept me away so far.

I share this sentiment, although I have wondered if they're being overly conservative with this statement.

I would say that research language is an appropriate description currently. For example it has very little standard library. Though I would say that it is well positioned to take off in the next year with several important improvements coming soon.

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