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by tluyben2
2351 days ago
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Mercury was pretty good last I tried and a very interesting language at that; I like Prolog and did quite a lot of work in it in the 90s (mostly research). I like how clean it looks (that's from Prolog) and the performance is great due to the fact that you give quite a lot of info to the compiler when you are programming (see for instance [0]). It has many backends it compiles to (Java, .NET, Erlang, native; not sure how well they are all maintained). It is a shame that not more people are working on the language and that not more people use it; I think there was not enough hype surrounding it. I gave up as it could not produce native code for ARM, a platform I always need for everything I do (for many years already), so to take a language seriously as something to dive in, it needs to have ARM support. Not sure what the state of that is now; this is many years ago. [0] https://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury_r... |
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There are quite a few very interesting and solid languages out there. One example for something that's not nearly well enough utilised or used widely is OCaml -- although in its case the lack of true multicore CPU support definitely cripples interest. But the language has an amazing type system that catches a _TON_ of errors (maybe even more than Rust's compiler, not entirely sure). And its compiler is just lightning-fast, fastest I've ever seen in fact. And it is multi-paradigm language (OOP and functional, and a lot of interesting typing constructs on top, half of which I don't even understand). Etc.
Not advocating for OCaml by the way (I work with Elixir and am looking to get better at Rust lately). It's just an example demonstrating that, again, there are a good amount of very solid languages and runtimes out there but we the programmers are so busy either (a) belonging to tribes or (b) being so damn busy we can't look beyond the tech we do our daily job with -- and then a lot of excellent tech gets left in the dust. :(
Mercury might be one of these tech pieces. And it's definitely not the only one.