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Comment by der_Fidelis | Hacker News Reader

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der_Fidelis·

At that point, why not just use another jvm language with these features like Kotlin?

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Scott McKinney, the guy behind that library, is also the guy behind Gosu [1].

Selling a new language is hard, selling a library is easier, even if this one has a hook deep in the code of javac.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosu_(programming_language)

the main feature of this allows you to transparently use structured data as types in your code like type providers in .net. I love kotlin but it can't do anything remotely like that.

Yep, I'm wondering if this actually works in Kotlin as well. I'm thinking it may probably play nice with this as is since Kotlin can interact with Java classes. However, the compiler plugin might be a problem. If so, this would be an awesome thing to add to Kotlin.

Ever tried to "sell" an alternative language in BigCo Enterprise? Where I work, Javascript is still a front-end only language and just tolerated as a toolchain for compiling LESS, ECMAScript etc.

or Scala https://www.scala-lang.org/

Scala comes with a lot of overhead in terms of features (and breaking changes in versions) and is still missing the meta-programming aspect of this library. In fact, scala has now deprecated all it's previous attempts at meta-programming and is still trying to work out it's next attempt (which is I believe black-box only so can't do what this library does).

at that point why not use C#?

C# doesn’t support type providers, only f# supports them.

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