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Comment by metaltyphoon | Hacker News Reader

> Not among our target audience it won't.

Yes it will. I have no interest in using Linux as desktop but I do use it for deployments. If there is one trait of major PL is the adoption of the big 3 OSes.

This is Hare’s biggest flaw right now.

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Hard disagree. Linux is by far the largest majority of server deployments, and you are not doing yourself any favors by not developing on the same platform as your deploy target.

I agree 100%, but balanced against the fact that many devs need laptops from their employer, and it's way easier to get a good macbook that just works good enough for development than a linux machine. Especially when you don't control ordering, or need to inherit machines.

Dev on Mac and deploy on Linux is a popular setup for a reason. Until there's a macbook pro for linux that you can just buy*, it's going to continue to be popular.

* the XPS 13/15 are about as close as you can get

The "Macbook Pro for Linux" may turn out to be the Macbook Pro: https://asahilinux.org/

(at least, once they add drivers for the GPU!)

...until Apple releases the next generation that breaks it. It's a bit sisyphean.

If you're developing on a macbook but targeting Linux, you should probably be using VMs

Macs are overpriced garbage. I cringe when I see one.

There are so many good laptops that work fine on Linux.

I never said it wasn't the biggest deployment target. I also think it's shortsighted to do this.

> you are not doing yourself any favors by not developing on the same platform as your deploy target

Why would I give up all the tooling I already have, such as an VS, to "do development on Linux"? Have you tried doing development from Visual Studio, VSCode on windows where it targets WSL? It's seamless and I don't really have to care much about Linux as a Desktop.

You can do that exact setup just fine with Hare only being able to compile for Linux (or FreeBSD). Providing a Linux runtime environment to run code that targets Linux is WSLs whole purpose.

And here is the entire problem.

> code that targets Linux

This is too big of an assumption to make. For instance, the last company I worked for does contract with DOD where output of the project is two installers for windows an macOS, despite the product working flawlessly on Linux.

The is a HUGE world out there where your deployment targets won't be Linux servers, and this is a huge blind spot for a mainstream want to be language.

Nobody ever said it wanted to be mainstream. It targets a niche, quite blatantly.

No based on what's going on the thread. There is comparison everywhere with mainstream languages.

It is fine to compare it to the mainstream languages, that's what programmers do.

With cross compilation or docker for development, I'm not clear on why using Linux is a huge boon to developing servers. Having been down the path of Linux-for-all-things, these days I'd much rather have a nice, fast macbook.

Modern web programming is almost always deployed on Unix-like operating systems / Linux. The biggest reason to allow running Hare on Windows/macOS would just be for developers who don't use Linux.

Correct, which outnumbers the number of developers using Linux only right? Why cut a substantial amount of your possible user base?

Inversely, why not? Why aim for a large user base? That doesn't sound aligned with the ideology behind this language

Keeping the scope niche/small seems like a feature to me, not a bug. Let non-FOSS OS users find something else (?)

I am personally no FOSS zealot but I can respect a project that has a firm idea of its scope and targeted user base and wishes to stay limited to that

Not everything needs to be huge or growth hacked to death

> I have no interest in using Linux as desktop

It sounds like you're not the target audience then?

Support only foss operating system is one of the biggest features right now.

Though I haven't tried it, I understand that some people do development inside a Docker container, so maybe you don't need to run Linux on your desktop?

It seems like a trick that's worth learning.

I'm aware of all these tricks including VSCode devcontainer. It's just a higher celling no matter how you slice it. The solutions with the least amount of resistance tends to win.

Look how easy it's to try these. I don't have to set up VMs or even know what make is to do anything.

- dotnet: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download

- rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started

- go: https://go.dev/dl/

If you WANT to be mainstream, you need to go the extra mile.

I think Hare's team DON'T want Hare to be mainstream.

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