Scripting Languages of the Future

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
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  1. passerine

    A small extensible programming language designed for concise expression with little code.

    Tossing my hat in for Passerine [1]. Gorgeous ML inspired syntax. Built for scripting Rust applications.

    Dreaming here: Lua is a fantastic scripting language, but the Rust FFI isn’t as ergonomic as it could be. Enter Luster [2], which is basically LuaJIT rewritten in Rust.

    Embedding a scripting language in a Rust application gives you tons of power (e.g. scripting Rust structs from Lua [3]), and setting this up isn’t terribly difficult.

    [1] https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine

    [2]: https://github.com/kyren/luster

    [3]: https://git.sr.ht/~ioiojo/kiwi

  2. InfluxDB

    InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

    InfluxDB logo
  3. piccolo

    An experimental stackless Lua VM implemented in pure Rust (by kyren)

    Tossing my hat in for Passerine [1]. Gorgeous ML inspired syntax. Built for scripting Rust applications.

    Dreaming here: Lua is a fantastic scripting language, but the Rust FFI isn’t as ergonomic as it could be. Enter Luster [2], which is basically LuaJIT rewritten in Rust.

    Embedding a scripting language in a Rust application gives you tons of power (e.g. scripting Rust structs from Lua [3]), and setting this up isn’t terribly difficult.

    [1] https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine

    [2]: https://github.com/kyren/luster

    [3]: https://git.sr.ht/~ioiojo/kiwi

  4. shelljs

    :shell: Portable Unix shell commands for Node.js

  5. zx

    A tool for writing better scripts

  6. empirical-lang

    A language for time-series analysis

    Some of the OP's observations are why I wrote Empirical [1].

    - I wanted static types that felt dynamic, which meant being able to infer types from a file as long as the file path can be determined at compile time.

    - I wanted Dataframes to be a first-class container since the high-level of abstraction leads to great performance when doing analytics.

    Therefore, I created a language with statically typed Dataframes. Empirical can infer a CSV's type at compile time, namely because performs compile-time function evaluation automatically. The result is a language that runs easily in a REPL but can be used for long-running scripts without worrying about common programming errors.

    [1] https://www.empirical-soft.com

  7. TablaM

    The practical relational programing language for data-oriented applications

    Don't get too focused on "scripting". making one today and you learn quickly, that scripting/compiled is blurred. Eventually, both will borrow a little of the other to be more performant or useful.

    ---

    I'm building on the side one (https://tablam.org) that is focused in the "crud" kind of apps and exist a lot of low-hanging fruit there. Simple stuff like making the paradigm relational/array from the start, support for decimals (and money and quantities?), in-built auto-vectorization (that comes almost for free when adding a bit of array languages) and a lot of other stuff I can't even explored yet.

    Current scripting languages are not there yet in ergonomic or features to the kind of apps we actually do (ie: The popular ones, you bet niche experiments like mine are there on way or another).

    ---

    And the gam is even harder today. In the article is mentioned better support for IDEs, that is more thought that I have expected!. This requiere a more sophisticate parsing pipeline and not much experience there around!.

    Also: Concurrency/parallelims. I don't think exist a truly nice ergonomic there. Sure, async/await is a little better, but none of the things I have experienced (with exception of SQL and magic) is something I could give to a "scripting user". You still need a complicated understanding of this, plus how express that in code.

  8. langs-in-rust

    A list of programming languages implemented in Rust, for inspiration.

    For anyone interested in languages written in Rust, here’s a list: https://github.com/alilleybrinker/langs-in-rust

  9. Stream

    Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video. Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

    Stream logo
  10. xonsh

    :shell: Python-powered shell. Full-featured and cross-platform.

  11. proposal-record-tuple

    Discontinued ECMAScript proposal for the Record and Tuple value types. | Stage 2: it will change!

    There's a proposal for immutable records and tuples: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-record-tuple

    Theoretically they would use structural sharing for their implementation which should reduce the overhead of creating a whole new array of objects like that

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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