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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

Carbon was clearly DOA the moment it was announced, IMHO. It looked cool but it served none but Google, and now with LLMs you have a massive incentive not to use a niche or new language due to how better LLMs get the bigger the corpus is

The only somewhat realistic proposal in this space is Herb Sutter's cpp2, which is arguably a massive improvement and I'm puzzled why nobody in the standard thought to give it a spin, there's just to much cruft they'll never be able to get rid of unless they make an alternate yet backward compatible syntax with C++ that changes the defaults from "random 80s nonsense" to something better

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Is there evidence that LLMs generate better code in more popular languages? I get the sense the "experience" translates between languages and it can reason in any language just fine. I write Clojure code using a rather esoteric framework (Pathom3). There is probably very little similar code out there (it's definitely a tiny fraction of the training dataset) but it seems to do just fine

Not saying you're wrong, just curious if there are numbers backing this up.

I built a brand new language to test this[1]. Not only is the language different to basically any other language but it also tries to be adversarial against LLM understanding.

The best models can still make sense of it[2], though the tasks so far have been pretty basic. But I do think it gives some evidence that languages which aren’t well represented in an LLM’s training can still be reasoned about and written well by LLMs.

1 - https://killswitch-lang.org

2 - https://bench.killswitch-lang.org

In my experience LLMs are way better when they "know" a language "instinctively". It's just that unless your language is very niche, the corpus is usually good enough. I tried using Claude to write my own personal language a while ago (I wrote a toy compiler decades ago) and it struggled a bit, because you could see in it's reasoning it had to "repeat" the syntax equivalence to itself while it read the code. It didn't just "know" it could use a given construct to do something; conversely Astra, when carefully instructed to do so, can plop down esoteric template code that works the first time, because it just "knows" it's the right stuff to write

Cpp2 has been dead for a while afaik, while Carbon is still going.

I don't think Carbon is dead, it just all depends on how easy it actually is to rewrite "all of C++" in Rust. (The jury is still out on this one, but it's not looking good.)

Yes, but at least it was a real thing with a serious proposal behind. Even if Carbon ships, what value would it give in 2029 or whenever it is in a world where writing rust or heck even C++ is now way easier and foolproof (as long as you know where to guide an LLM)

The Carbon team has always been the first one to assert this is for Google internal purpose first and formost, everyone else should go to Rust, Java, Go, C#, Swift,... whatever fits their workloads.

It has been the social media that has given Carbon a roadmap that the team never communicated.

As for Cpp2, it was yet another C++ wannabe replacement, sold as if it wasn't, because the chair of ISO C++ at the time, naturally could not be seen as yet another one coming up with C++ wannabe replacements as well.

None of these solutions has a chance. That should be clear from the beginning. C++ community is so slow at updating codebase to latest C++ standard, let alone a different language. The last thing the C++ community will do is to migrate to an incompatible language that only looks/reads like C++. That did not happen in the past 30 years and will not happen now.

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