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Comment by herbstein | Hacker News Reader

> This seems fine I guess, but just another "check all the boxes" language that doesn't really bring much of anything obvious new to the table.

Full disclosure: I have contributed a small amount of code to the standard library of Flix.

Personally I find the inclusion of Datalog as a first-class citizen in an otherwise functional language to be a pretty powerful feature that I personally haven't really seen done before.

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> Personally I find the inclusion of Datalog as a first-class citizen in an otherwise functional language to be a pretty powerful feature that I personally haven't really seen done before.

It's neat, but IIUC, it needing to be a language feature (versus being included as a library) emerges from the lack of macro support. That's one of my issues with non-macro languages, I have to wait for the language owners to add this stuff.

In Flix, Datalog constraints are first-class values. This is strictly more powerful than a macro system. For example, the Datalog programs that are constructed can depend on input values to the program. This is not the case for macros which are expanded compile-time. (Unless you have some kind of reflection in mind...)

EDIT: I hope to explore a macro system for Flix in the future. So we are definitely on the same side of the issue; just wanted to point out that the current system is more powerful.

How does Flix compare to Mercury? https://mercurylang.org/

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