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by giancarlostoro 982 days ago
I do dream of some serious Erlang alternative that runs on its own without needing an entire runtime, but in all honesty Elixir / Erlang are insanely optimized, it blows my mind. I think I'm too used to the C#'s and Pythons of today, I too used Basic and a little bit of Pascal back in the day. I'm always excited by D but it gets overshadowed by Go and Rust it feels like, despite having really good features and a familiar syntax for anyone coming from C# / Java / C-like languages in my opinion.
2 comments
zoogeny 982 days ago
I'm glad you mentioned D and I literally paused while writing the above to consider if I should include it. Back when I was writing a lot of C++ (decades ago now) my greatest hope was that D would catch on. It is hard to say why it didn't and I think all of the hype on the C++ successor goes to Rust these days. Zig is probably the most likely candidate for a C replacement even though D has a subset termed as Better C.

It really is the case that there is an endless list of programming languages now that serve as inspiration for almost every use case. I mean, I didn't even mention Clojure or Julia or Lua ... the list of truly interesting language and approaches is almost endless.

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giancarlostoro 982 days ago
I see the potential in D, what I think it needs is a batteries included web framework maybe built on top of Vibe.d or forked from Vibe.d that means you don't have to piece together all the missing pieces. The more you can get done OOTB in a language, the more likely you are to use a language / framework.
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drannex 982 days ago
I don't think you can have a serious Erlang alternative without an entire runtime, but if you are interested in the (better) C-style syntax, then you miht be interested in Gleam[1] which is a seriously cool Erlang based language that is built with standard styling and ideas (type-safe, concurrency (actor-based), C-style, immutable, you can even compile out to javascript and run in the browser)

Think Elixir, access to the entire Erlang VM (and any other language/package built on it) with the syntax of C and you are there.

[1] https://gleam.run/

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giancarlostoro 982 days ago
I forgot about Gleam, it is definitely really interesting, but its also strange since I think you have to compile your code, I don't think you can just debug it as you write it.
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