[munificent]

I agree with you in principle. After all, "ML" got its name "metalanguage" from the fact that it was explicitly designed to be a domain-specific language for implementing programming languages. It's hard to be a DSL at its job.

At the same time, that has to be balanced with the ecosystem value of implementing your language in a language lots of others knows.

It's a worthwhile investment to implement your language with 4x the code in Python/Java/JS/etc. if you get more than 4x contributions because of it.

[wtetzner]

> It's a worthwhile investment to implement your language with 4x the code in Python/Java/JS/etc. if you get more than 4x contributions because of it.

Maybe, but I'd say it depends on the quality of the contributions.

[chubot]

That's definitely a consideration, depending on your goals. For many language projects, I don't think you need more than one person for the front end. For libraries and code gen, you definitely need contributions.

IMO it's actually advantageous to have a compact description of a lexer, parser, and AST that one person edits or very few people edit. That's your language design.

At one point I thought: "If ML is so great, then why don't you see it more often in the real world?" And then the revelation was that Python essentially uses ML to describes its AST:

http://svn.python.org/projects/python/tags/r32b1/Parser/Pyth...

This is Zephyr ASDL, an ML-inspired DSL for describing ASTs. A lot of ML people may recognize Andrew Appel from the authors list:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=11682730813888505...

So my favorite language's AST is described with ML!!! And has been for 10+ years. (Python has a Grammar file as well in a different syntax).

I'm actually interested in a hybrid architecture: an interpreter where OCaml generates the byte code, and then C++ executes it. I think you can produce extremely compact and flexible interpreters with this architecture, and there are several other advantages to dividing it this way.

The downside is perhaps a more complex build process, but the OCaml toolchain is quite nice actually, and I have compiled it from scratch. It's head and shoulders above Haskell in that regard. OCaml can produce .o files and link with C/C++, so you still get one executable.

I looked at your Wren language which I like a lot. I did wish the front end was more high level and not in C, but that's just me :)

There are a lot of people coming around to OCaml. Facebook is using it for Flow and pfff language manipulation:

https://github.com/facebook/pfff (I suspect Google's code analysis tools would be cut down in size by 5x if written like this in OCaml.)

And Hack, the statically typed PHP, is written in OCaml. And there are several more minor languages like HaXe and another one that are OCaml.

So if you're looking for contributions from language experts, there's definitely a lot that are familiar with OCaml.