prepack VS reason

Hello HN,

I'm considering the development of a new programming language, drawing inspiration from Rust's strengths, with a focus on compiling to JavaScript. Here what I'm considering are some key features:

Strict Type System

Algebraic Data Types

*Unsafe Mode for JS/TS Interaction*: Facilitate direct interaction with existing JavaScript and TypeScript code.

No Null Usage: Option/Result patterns to avoid null.

Trait Implementation

Backend Development Priority: Initially targeting server-side applications.

Efficient Compiler Design: Including features like dead-code elimination and partial evaluation, similar to the approach of Prepack[0] (by Facebook).

I believe this approach could bring significant benefits, especially with recent advancements like Uint8Array and worker threads.

Would this be of interest to the community? Looking forward to your insights and discussion.

[0] https://github.com/facebookarchive/prepack

You can still do optimisations based purely on Javascript semantics. This is similar to the first example you give with dead function elimination, and many minifiers do some amount of this already, but you can take it to some extremes. One example of this is the (no longer maintained) Prepack project from Facebook. The core idea is to evaluate as much Javascript as possible at compile time, with the expectation that the result will probably be smaller (albeit less human readable) than the initial code.

It's no longer maintained, but I think prepack is roughly what you're looking for.

i've had code where it intentionally relied on the wrong behavior (missing hook dependencies) and when I fixed it it caused an unintentional bug (hook fired too often or sometimes infinite rerendering). Yes it is more of a bug in the code rather than React hooks issue but it is also really hard to fix/rewrite. while i'd love to jump on the hype train projects like https://github.com/facebookarchive/prepack and how concurrent mode is still experimental after five+ years doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

Some real examples in JavaScript can be seen on Prepack[2]. Consequently it is natural to wonder whether we can AOT compile components of client side frameworks, to achieve a reduction in the final bundle size, but also to increase application execution speed.

Less or more it’s likely to happen, and could have been expected 2-3 years ago.

Especially with https://github.com/facebook/prepack. They want to eventually ship pre-compiled components rather than React.createElement() to end user

https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/7324

I also think this is why facebook had been investing in `prepack` - https://github.com/facebook/prepack

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/

When I see this it makes me want to run for ReasonML/ReScript/Elm/PureScript.

Sum types (without payloads on the instances they are effectively enums) should not require a evening filling ceremonial dance event to define.

https://reasonml.github.io/

https://rescript-lang.org/

https://elm-lang.org/

https://www.purescript.org/

(any I forgot?)

It's nice that TS is a strict super set of JS... But that's about the only reason TS is nice. Apart from that the "being a strict super set" hampers TS is a million and one ways.

To my JS is too broken to fix with a strict super set.

> The syntax is also not very friendly IMO.

Very true. There's an alternate syntax for OCaml called "ReasonML" that looks much more, uh, reasonable: https://reasonml.github.io/

I wish they would update their blog![0] The last post is from Aug. 2018, which definitely gives the impression that the project is dead.

But it's not dead, if you look at their GitHub.[1]

[0] https://reasonml.github.io/blog/

[1] https://github.com/reasonml/reason

OCaml makes so much sense to me -- it's just a shame that the syntax has some weird decisions.

I wish ReasonML (https://reasonml.github.io/) would come back -- it's a new syntax for the same language, kind of an Elixir/Erlang thing.

Ocaml is still a wonderful language if you want to look into it, and Reason is still going strong as an alternate syntax for OCaml. With either OCaml or Reason you can compile to native code, or use the continuation of BuckleScript now called Melange.

Hey HN, at Ahrefs we have been working on an online book that hopefully helps React developers get up and running with Melange, an OCaml to JavaScript compiler. You can read more about Melange here: https://melange.re/.

There are still a few chapters that we'd like to add before considering it "complete", but it might be already helpful for some folks out there, that's why we decided to publish it early.

The book uses Reason syntax to implement React components using ReasonReact components. You can read more about both in:

https://reasonml.github.io/

ReScript is "Fast, Simple, Fully Typed JavaScript from the Future". What that means is that ReScript has a lightning fast compiler, an easy to learn JS like syntax, strong static types, with amazing features like pattern matching and variant types. Until 2020 it was called "BuckleScript" and is closely related to ReasonML.