FWIW we also store ASTs, not text. We offer many of the same benefits. Some day (soon?) I'll write up a full comparison between the two, because it seems a common ask.
87 karma · joined March 28, 2023
Do you actually _like_ git? Or is it just good enough to get by?
Do you like having to git pull and git push and set up remotes and such? Or would something more integrated into your language and team and setup be nicer?
I think git is great, and better than many other options, but I don't think it's optimal. And it's not integrated with a larger system optimally.
Besides, while you do edit Darklang code in a text editor, it's not (WIP[1]) saved just in text files on disk. When you save, the code is automatically synced, available to you (and your team) immediately (with feature flagging and other tools to help make sure you don't "merge" incomplete/bad/broken stuff).
I absolutely understand the hesitancy, and concerns about vendor lock-in. We're doing our best to not lock users in, including working towards nice ways to "export" all of your dark stuff to another language/etc, using AI, if you so choose to bail.
[1] with minor extension, a text editor may work upon 'virtual' text files / workspaces, and when you save those, cool things happens. (yes, this is a bit hand-wavey, but we're just a few folks at this point and doing our best to make it less hand-wavey, soon :) )
Yeah -- my history is all with web dev. APIs, server- and client-side rendered HTML. Web-RTC. Http Clients. all that jazz. Your use definitely fits - in the meantime, before the site updates are done, I implore you to review the status update linked in the main post, watch the video embedded, and try out darklang-classic to get a feel. If you want a deeper peek in to our code (well, a snapshot from a bit over a year ago), the first few minutes of https://stachu.net/darklang-for-fsharp-devs might be useful.
Maybe it's OK that software / the industry means less. Maybe death just puts things into perspective? At least, that feels like a component to me. Maybe I should have spent less time coding and more time calling him.
I'd say that Darklang-classic is ready enough for small projects, esp any web APIs. I've used it successfully for a good chunk of projects. That said, it's an imperfect solution, as outlined by the post on the main Darklang blog.
Darklang-next definitely isn't ready yet. I think I'll be porting the vast majority of _my_ code to Darklang by the end of the year, if not months earlier, but you know, software estimates. I'll do my best to keep in touch writing more posts with status updates.
By no git we definitely don't mean no version control.
The website, admittedly, needs a lot of work. We spent all of 2023 forking the project and having our heads down coding. Only at the end of year did we resurface to create a new homepage and stuff. So, it's a bit thin, and needs revisions. Personally I've kinda been punting that until we rewrite the site in darklang, but clearly many people are not appreciating the content on the site, so maybe that punting was a bad choice.
Appreciate the other ideas too -- responding to a bunch of comments now but will circle back to read this comment and process it fully. Cheers.
> Will this just look like yet another language, with versioning and release processes, database connections, blah blah... like every other language, only this one is small and weird and different?
no.
Darklang is still deployless, with no infra setup, and centered around trace-driven debugging. All the good stuff that made the product good. We just got rid of our editor, and weren't clear enough in the post that we're maintaining all of the good stuff, but putting it into a different box. Will clarify further in the next post, thanks for your input.