typespec VS nballerina

It does not exist, but it will be worked on fairly soon. You can track progress on GitHub [1]. It will be as you suggest - a one time conversion, after which you can iterate. We have this workflow for inside Azure, but the converter is Azure-specific (e.g. converts to TypeSpec that uses our extensive Azure-specific component library). It will take a bit to generalize.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/typespec/issues/3038

Afaik there's nothing that's widely used and of which I'd say I prefer it. But I'm having hopes for https://github.com/microsoft/typespec (former cadl). The reason being that yaml/JSON specs get huge very quickly, OpenAPI has to fight with restrictions of yaml/JSON ($refs, splitting up into files, oneOf, etc.) and tooling is ok but not great.

You've touched on some use cases I've thought about and led me to ask the question.

I also recently saw Microsoft take a higher level approach with CADL/Typespec: https://microsoft.github.io/typespec/ which could be cool if it reaches wide adoption.

This one just crossed my feed today: Cadl, "... a language for describing cloud service APIs and generating other API description languages, client and service code, documentation, and other assets."

oh boy -- lot's of work ahead for you folks, best of luck! I'll be watching this project. We do a ton with GCP so when this matures we'll be looking at it more.

How do you compete with -- if at all -- with Ballerina lang? https://ballerina.io/

PS: This advice stems from my personal experience while building BallerinaLang. We spent the first two to three years working with our own bytecode interpreter before we transitioned to JVM bytecode. Our LLVM backend is still under development and has a long way to go.

Considering your rich background in C++ and Haskell, along with your interest in functional programming paradigms, I wouldn't necessarily predict that Ballerina will "blow your mind." However, you might find certain familiar syntax while encountering numerous "why?" questions.

Ballerina actually showed some innovative ways to do it and is an interesting language to keep an eye on... finally, Unison decided to focus on its cloud offering and seamless distributed functional programming. Also a really cool language.

Last week I found Ballerina (https://ballerina.io/) via a comment here on HN, which got me thinking that I've gotten a bit out of touch with newer/up and coming languages in development. My guess is that, if I missed Ballerina before a week ago, I've probably missed quite a bit more.

What have I missed? And it would be cool to see where people are finding these types of things too.

https://ballerina.io/ and https://www.asyncapi.com/ seem like two efforts to move in this direction a bit for web APIs.

Reminds me of https://ballerina.io/

... which looks actually pretty nice, but I suspect the name of the project is a terrible marketing decision that will hold adoption back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯