[emodendroket]

> Hence why successful languages always need some kind of killer feature, or a company with deep enough pockets willing to push it into the mainstream no matter what.

There's a third strategy: hitching your wagon to an already-successful ecosystem, like languages such as Kotlin do.

[pjmlp]

That strategy always falls apart when the ecosystem goes into a direction that the guest languages did not forsaw, or already created incompatible concepts, and then get the dilema of what to expose from the underlying ecosystem.

Using Kotlin as example, its initial selling point was Java compatibility, now it wants to be everywhere, and its Java compatibility story is also constrained for what Android Java is capable of.

So the tooling attrition increases, with KMM, wrapping FFI stuff to be called from Java like coroutines, and everything that is coming with Loom, Panama and Valhala.