> Rust without lifetimes sounds wonderful

This is the kind of comment I was hoping to see. Borgo is higher level than Rust and can massively benefit from simplifying certain parts of Rust for ease of use and better ergonomics.

So even if it (currently) looks like Rust, it doesn't have any lifetimes nor borrow checking. It's just syntax, but I understand it can be confusing.

I could type an entire essay on "Why not Haskell". I've used it professionally for a few years and came to the conclusion that sticking to a tiny subset of the language (what I used to call Simple Haskell, I even wrote a book about it :D) is the only way to make it work in a large codebase in a team setting.

I've become weary of type astronauts and I don't want to use a language that allows or even promote certain (ab)use of type system features. In this sense, OCaml or even Elm are more inline with what I think is the sweet spot.

Borgo isn't too far off Ocaml to be fair if you squint a bit. Unfortunately OCaml suffers from years (decades?) of cruft that has accumulated over, to the point that even before you get started you have to pick an stdlib implementation. I know things are improving, but you get my point.

Ultimately I think that if a new language wants to be succesful and see some adoption, it has to integrate in an established ecosystem. See Typescript, but also Swift, Clojure, Scala and others.

I'd wish Borgo could do to Go what Typescript did to JS, bringing in additional type safety and modern features that people are starting to get used to from other less popular languages. Admittedly, TS is a bad comparison because of the madness you can encode at the type level, but the fact that it's been compatible with JS from day one is it's biggest selling point imo.

Borgo is a programming language I've been working on for the past year. It looks like Rust (because I didn't want to write a parser) and compiles to Go.

What I want from a programming language is:

  - Sum types
  - Pattern matching
  - Option/Result types
  - Garbage collected
  - Concurrency without async
  - Good third-party package ecosystem

One ambitious goal of this project is to be compatible with existing Go packages. Generating bindings is pretty much automatic (there's an importer tool) and should help massively with adoption. The repo includes bindings to some packages in the stdlib already.

The compiler is in no way complete, but you can definitely build some interesting programs with it.

The online playground runs the compiler as a WASM binary, stitches together the transpiled Go code and sends it off for execution to the official Go playground.

The playground contains quite a few examples and goes more in depth into each feature: https://borgo-lang.github.io/

Would appreciate any feedback! :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36847594

Points: 18

# Comments: 8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22525177

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Thanks to Andrea Buran for the cool design ;)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11067376

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Congrats for having built a fairly complete tool with a unique approach to it, that I kinda dig. Also, good work on putting together the example apps, they're extremely useful to understand how the platform works.

I was a big fan of XSLT myself and I know how much shit talking people do about XML.

And I think that's the big shortcoming of this platform, people wouldn't even consider it for a split of a second after seeing the first . To be honest, while this looks very promising, I think it's a few years late.

I'll give it a serious try when I get the chance!

I've got to say I really like this browser, well done!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246240

Points: 155

# Comments: 47