It really does seem like the people who complain about how long it's taking either have no context for how long this stuff takes. You can knock out a toy language in a month, sure, but growing an actually production ready serious systems language, with a solid compiler which produces optimized code across platforms, and a complete standard library and solid core abstractions, and a good module system, and incremental parallel compilation which scales to millions of LoC, and with innovative language features which aren't in comparable mainstream languages... that takes time.
It wasn't widely announced until IIRC 2008, and it was public and in popular use by 2011 or so (long before 1.0 - just as e.g. Zig is definitely pre-1.0, but also very clearly a real language that people are using).
How many years are you planning to wait for Jai? Serious question - if it's still not publicly available in e.g. 2034, are you still going to be saying that's just how long these things take?
If it's still not available in 2034, I guess you can fairly say it's taking a while. But then again, so what; if it comes out in 2036 it comes out in 2036.
There's this whole 'passing of time', and "we'll all eventually die", thing though, right?
If it comes out in 2036, it's totally irrelevant for a working dev in 2024 to be concerned with it. So that he'll get to use it in a decade? At this point it's already a promise-ware, and it's like it has community adoption to be promising.
-Jai is promising!
-Jai has been in development for years and there's no examples, no compiler, no github, no website, let alone package management and all the associated documentation
-Yea but he's still working on it!
If he does manage to release it and live up to the hype that'll be great, but until then I will respectfully be in the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp :)