Seems more like something between Swift and unsafe Rust.
Is anything known about the key developers? I would imagine such a project needs firepower. Rust had Mozilla's heft from the get-go. Most successful languages have another big sponsor.
Still, I don't really see this going anywhere. There are already so many "slightly better C++" languages out there, e.g. D, cppfront/cpp2, Carbon, Zig and they pretty much all don't see wider adoption for the same reason. No matter how simple or ergonomic the interop with C++ is, the switching cost is still high and the benefit tends to be marginal. Almost all of them either include garbage collection or don't fully guarantee memory safety. Choosing a restricted subset of C++ and an opinionated, enforced linter & static analyzer goes a long way and gets you most of the benefits of these new languages, so organizations tend to just do that.
The exception is Rust, because in spite of all its downsides it has the killer feature of guaranteed memory safety without garbage collection, so that's the one seeing constantly increasing institutional support.
Their second milestone should show memory safety features, and AFAIK it comes up a year or two later.
These milestones will produce technology demonstrators - so there's no expectations people would be using Carbon for anything beyond small demos and maybe check if it can be integrated with their existing C++ codebases.
Then they will try to package up the language and tooling around it with these two flagship features. This is where they expect some people to use the language for real. The language will only support a subset of C++ (they haven't decided what exactly it should include), and they mentioned Rust-like subdivision into "unsafe" and "safe" Carbon. To me this all looks like even after those milestones it may take a while.
Also, while Google folks are hopeful they also donated billions to Rust to improve C++ interoperability there, too. They don't bet on one language only but rather see multiple of them develop and spread.
So, tldr: it's years and years away.
With Swift, that's not true. Sometimes you can wait for a while for the compiler to churn before it bails and tells you it can't fully infer types. As a Rust user, this is entirely unacceptable.
I would have to say, while I don't thoroughly dislike Swift, I do thoroughly dislike Xcode and the Apple ecosystem. The fact that Swift was tied so closely to iOS development for so long means it's not a language that people generally reach for. It feels more like ObjectiveC++ and a facet of the Apple ecosystem as a vehicle into iOS development.
People say that Rust's killer feature is the memory safety, but for me it's always been the ergonomics. Cargo and the painless dependency process is the real killer feature. Swift just doesn't have the same appeal, and that they are slowly getting there is a testament to Rust having already cracked the code; Swift only went fully cross platform (Windows+Linux+Mac) in 2020, so there's a lot of reputation as an Apple language to undo, as well as a lot of ground to catch up on. It's interesting to note that the ground they have to make up is pretty much the path that Rust blazed. So for a lot of the target audience of Swift, the question isn't "why Swift?", it's "why not Rust?". Really, they only good answer for Swift right now is "my target platform Apple."
I will take an actual look into it later though, seems interesting.
"Non-Nullable Types by Default: In Helix, all types are non-nullable by default, significantly reducing the risk of null-pointer errors. Helix uses a novel approach to nullable types - Questionable Types, which allows for more explicit handling of null or panicking values."
But then when you look at questionable types, it says:
"You can use a questionable type like a regular variable. If you use it in a context where a non-questionable type is required, Helix implicitly checks its validity: If the value is valid, it proceeds. If the value is null or an error, the program stops with a crash."
Is that not exactly the same behavior that Java has?
Also yeah seems like they reinvented null pointer crashes but with extra steps.
https://github.com/helixlang/helix-lang/commit/4d949efd42b8d...
Wow, these really do seem to be LLM written, and I would guess ChatGPT. This long README has a bunch of generic, redundant statements over and over again.
Consider this Java method:
void frobnicate(bar Bar)
{
// is bar null? Who knows?
}
I’ve never heard of this language before today and don’t have an opinion on it, but I do find the Questionable Types interesting: sort of collapsing Option and Result into one very concise notation.
So glad to hear this. I now consider this the single most important requirement when am evaluating a new programming language.
Error handling looks well thought out as well.
Very interested in how the borrow checker logic would shape up.
If this delivers on the promises made, it would pretty much be my dream programming language.
This does not work well for FILE in C, for instance.
Does the conversion happen during run-time? Isn't that going to be super expensive?
To some of us that is a major feature of Rust and Zig, but good luck.
Just curious, what benefit OOP offers over other paradigms in AI dev?
While dogfooding your language is a great to stress test it, you want to make sure you're testing the right stresses -- the ones your target users will encounter. A compiler may be that thing, but chances are it is not; most people do not write nor do they aspire to write compilers. So showing off that you've written a compiler in your language doesn't attract users, because they're still left with the question "Okay, well what does it do for me?"
Another reason is that there is an infinite amount of work that goes into writing a compiler. It's really endless, especially for a small team or solo dev. If you try bootstrapping, it means essentially maintaining two compilers until you can fully bootstrap, which may never come. One compiler is really enough work.
The final reason I will say is it takes forever, and puts a total brake on new features, which can really kills project momentum. Writing the first bits of a language can really fly. But when you sit down to bootstrap, it means you're not releasing new features, but redoing everything you've already done. This leads to unfortunate messages like "We’ve now started work on the self-hosted compiler, using the current rudimentary C++-based implementation as a bootstrap.", which followers take to mean "the project is currently in hiatus for the foreseeable future until this background work on the bootstrap compiler is done". This is a critical point in language projects where the bootstrap might never be completed.
When I look at a new language project I always check out the "contributors" section. Whenever I see an initial flurry of activity from one or a few devs, followed by a taper off into nothing, I know the project is in trouble. It seems like maybe this author has hit a wall, and I would be highly suspicious of the bootstrap endeavor causing it.
johnisgood•7h ago
That is good to know.