ponyc VS gleam

> Capabilities taken literally are more of a network thing (it's how you prove you have access to a computer that doesn't trust you). On a language, you don't need the capabilities themselves.

You may be thinking of the term in a different context. In this context, they are a general security concept and definitely apply to more than the network, including languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

http://habitatchronicles.com/2017/05/what-are-capabilities/

https://www.ponylang.io/

etc...

Actors immediately made me think of Pony. https://www.ponylang.io

Or give up and erase all the type information by saying `throws Exception` or `throws Throwable`.

Genericizing throws in particular was tried in Midori [2] and worked out really well (by report). In addition, several less-than-completely-obscure languages are starting to experiment with the algebra of effects in general (as opposed to error handling in particular). Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/), OCaml (https://ocaml.org/manual/5.2/effects.html) and others are experimenting with bringing what Koka (among others; https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/index.html) to the masses.

[1]: https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...

For example, the actor's model is not used by a lot of languages, Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/) and Elixir are the only ones that I know, but they address the concurrency problem quite well, while it's a pain to deal with in other languages at large scale.

And that last point is critical. If the language flatly can't represent some concepts it uses, they have to be implemented somewhere else. I had a similar discussion with a proponent for Pony once- the language itself is 100% safe, and fully dependent on C for its runtime and data structures. One of Rust's core strengths is being able to express unsafe concepts, meaning the unsafe code can expose a safe interface that accurately describes its requirements rather than an opaque C ABI. Vale doesn't seem to do that.

"Exterior iteration. Iteration used to be by stack / non-escaping coroutines, which we also called "interior" iteration, as opposed to "exterior" iteration by pointer-like things that live in variables you advance. Such coroutines are now finally supported by LLVM (they weren't at the time) and are actually a fairly old and reliable mechanism for a linking-friendly, not-having-to-inline-tons-of-library-code abstraction for iteration. They're in, like, BLISS and Modula-2 and such. Really normal thing to have, early Rust had them, and they got ripped out for a bunch of reasons that, again, mostly just form "an argument I lost" rather than anything I disagree with today. I wish Rust still had them. Maybe someday it will!"

I remember that one. The change was shortly after I started fooling with Rust and was major. Major as in it broke all the code that I'd written to that point.

"Async/await. I wanted a standard green-thread runtime with growable stacks -- essentially just "coroutines that escape, when you need them too"."

I remember that one, too; it was one of the things that drew me to the language---I was imagining something more like Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/).

"The Rust I Wanted probably had no future, or at least not one anywhere near as good as The Rust We Got."

Almost certainly true. But The Rust We Got is A Better C++, which was never appealing to me because I never liked C++ anyway.

Pony or bust.

OCaml and Haskell already have that nice type system (and even more nice). If OCaml's syntax bothers you, there is Reason [1] which is a different frontend to the same compiler suite.

Also in this space is Gleam [2] which targets Erlang / OTP, if high concurrency and fault tolerance is your cup of tea.

[1]: https://reasonml.github.io/

[2]: https://gleam.run/

Wow. I invite everyone to go actually read the Gleam’s homepage: https://gleam.run/

After reading the discussion here, with our poor community being “blinded by pathetic posturing” and such, I was expecting some kind of political polemic plastered over everything.

Here’s the sum total of everything that could be considered political from the page:

Friendly

As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

Which part of that can you possibly find objectionable? It seems the mere mention of anything political is seen as a transgression somehow. Like, Can’t we just go back to pretending we’re entirely apolitical, while the technologies we build reshape the political landscape of the entire planet?

Gleam GitHub Repository

Official Gleam Documentation

- https://without.boats/blog/revisiting-a-smaller-rust/

It's also niche, but https://gleam.run/ might be a candidate alternate language, depending on your use-case.

Not the other commenter, but my team has been using Elixir in production (soft real-time distributed systems) for several years to great success. The approachable syntax has been great for folks new to the language coming on board and sort of, not realising they’re “doing FP”.

Generally I’d say Elixir’s lack of “hard” static typing is more than made up for what you get from the BEAM VM, OTP, its concurrency model, supervisors etc.

That said if you’re interested in leveraging the platform whilst also programming with types I’d recommend checking out Gleam (https://gleam.run), which I believe uses an HM type system.

The BEAM runtime demonstrates the power of building concurrency and fault tolerance into the core runtime. While other languages can approximate these capabilities through frameworks, the elegance and robustness of having it built into the runtime remains compelling. I believe that’s why Gleam decided to use the BEAM when it was being built.

Gleam

Gleam as it says in their website is a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale!.