Libmantle Alternatives

libmantle reviews and mentions

• Austral Programming Language
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jul 2023

  Almost certainly not, and there are good reasons for that.

  Work on Austral was initiated by Borretti in 2021, but its earnest development really only commenced in January this year. So we're talking about a language that's, for most intents and purposes, less than a year old. Even if the January release was stable, there would not have been time for anyone to develop and deploy significant projects in it. But it is not stable: it still under construction, with certain inherent instabilities. Notably, recent updates changed the borrow syntax and FFI pragmas. Similarly, the surrounding infrastructure (compiler and standard library) is far from production-ready yet.

  I built an Austral interface for the seL4 Core Platform (https://github.com/zaklogician/libmantle/tree/main), and ran some Austral apps on hardware. The purpose of this was experimental (we wanted to know how Austral can help us design fail-safe seL4 Core Platform APIs, and it was a success), but probably among the closest anybody came to "production": I wrote more Austral code than currently included in the Austral standard library.

  It revealed several bugs, including a typo in Standard.Buffer which leads to the invariant check for the Buffer type always failing, and issues related to the compiler's handling of large unsigned literals.

  Austral shows great promise, and has already provided us with valuable insights about linear API design, and exciting glimpses into its future capabilities. Using Austral in production code, however, might require a few more years of maturation and stabilization. So if you want something that people use for writing production code, check back in a couple of years.