Re:Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
by runawaybottle on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @01:01PM
(#23249182)
I hope you are right, it took no time for Typescript to catch on, and got ordained in Deno.
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At this point I'd _rejoice_ if someone could offer a credible alternative to Javascript for web (and other browser-based/cross-platform mobile) dev. Google tried and utterly failed with Dart; Microsoft embraced JS via Typescript (extend and extinguish, sure, whatever; TS is fantastic); Facebook embraced JS via React (and React Native on mobile, though they've since pulled back a bit from that...); and Apple is predictably absent from the room.
There's pretty much no one left in the conversation who could credibly move us past an endless JS-only future of progressively-more-TS-like ES20XXs at this point...
It's sad to me that nobody would consider a new option unless a FAANG, or otherwise huge company, were backing it.
And the Deno team moved from Golang to Rust for their implementation. Maybe that will result in some interesting developments.
I prefer to think of this as Ryan Dahl choosing Mozilla over Google, whatever the relative merits of Golang vs. Rust.
Not that it matters, but I think it's much more likely he chose Rust specifically for the language features over Go. A lot of Rust's type-system and semantics are inspired by ML-family languages which are well-known to be great for writing parsers, etc.
Re:Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
by steveklabnik on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @03:00PM
(#23250466)
At the initial presentation, Ryan mentioned that a move from Go to Rust was a possibility due to a few things, and they were related to the languages themselves, not to Mozilla vs Google or something.
(And, IMHO, saying that Rust is a Mozilla thing is just plain incorrect.)