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These days lots of languages are single-team efforts, because producing high-quality production programming languages is an incredibly large amount of (difficult) work. It is really, really difficult, it takes many years, you constantly get shit on by people for everything, and if you're lucky you might get a tiny bit of money after a while. It isn't just coincidental complexity; programmers are actually incredibly demanding users with many needs. And so it isn't easy to find the money and people to perform multiple implementations, outside of very particular cases. Even the ratio of C/C++ programmers to high quality implementations that see significant production use is basically astronomical. And the unfortunate news is that alternative implementations don't often contribute very much to the overall production-language effort if they aren't of high quality or set out to achieve particular goals. I used to work on the Haskell compiler GHC. Haskell has had many alternative implementations over the years. But they were often nowhere near the level of engineering quality of GHC, and nobody used them for nearly anything, unless they were graduate students exploring surface and language semantics. But many of them just used GHC instead, too. It wasn't for lack of trying either; lots of people wanted the standard for the language to work, I used to be on the standards committee for the language. So they were useful to some extent design space. But there are many, many, many other important concerns for a "production" programming language; robust feature support, good platform support, high quality code output, robust testing regime and code review, good library and API design, high quality debugging support, package management, editor support, all kinds of stuff. These also dovetail together; certain efforts at the semantic level are nice but if they don't have a good story for debugging or something, they might not make the cut. Really this seems like one of those requirements that's always impossible to satisfy in some sense, a kind of catch-22. If you're one of the 800lb gorilla programming languages (Java, C++, Python), you might have one or two "production" implementations and if you're lucky the ratio of usage is better than 80/20, but they exist and therefore you are a "production-ready" language. Nobody else has the money to staff engineers for multiple alternative languages (OCaml, Elixir, TypeScript, Go) despite them funding billions of dollars worth of software, so they still aren't "professional" and therefore do not qualify. I get it, and it's not for zero merit, but I think it's mostly just a cat-and-mouse game, at the end of the day. gcc-rs existing of course has many other benefits beyond this; people know GCC so they can now have a free Rust compiler for their CPU ports, etc. This is still good. But really it's still the exception. I do think this is a good effort but I consider this sort of thing one of those basic folklore issues that's actually much more nuanced in practice. |