[sph]

IIRC José recently said he was was gonna spend some time thinking about Elixir's approach to typing, so that's probably it.

My hope is a smaller runtime that works well for CLI tools. I'd love to use Elixir for small scripts I'd ordinarily use Go/Python for.

[hinkley]

I had an idea years ago when I still had the young man’s dream about writing a programming language. It came after I took over a J2ME project that was trying to do a great deal of functionality in an 85K jarfile.

That idea was that there should be a little language inside of each big language that is used to implement the self hosting aspects of the language, and then a small set of additional libraries would provide a usable embedded variant of the ecosystem, good for small places and things that have to start quickly.

[packetlost]

I like this idea. I believe Rust does something somewhat similar (though not quite) for processing compile-time procedural macros. We see somewhat similar, but external approaches in the Clojure ecosystem with Babashka and Joker (and probably a few others).

In general, I like this, but not every language actually needs it. Like, what would that even be in Python for example?

[hinkley]

Something for PyPy perhaps? JITs written in the host language are the original use case I was thinking of, but that’s not the sole domain where it applies.