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Comment by seti0Cha | Hacker News Reader

> The original Jakt prototype was written in Rust by myself and JT over a couple of weeks before we made it public. I wrote a post introducing Jakt and the motivations behind it. And JT made a video about the creation of Jakt as well. The Rust-based compiler is now long-gone, and Jakt is fully self-hosted with the Jakt compiler being written in Jakt itself.

It's always humbling for me to read updates from SerenityOS :)

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I was a bit skeptical of Jakt at first. I thought using a new language I'm not familiar with would add a layer of indirection to my entertainment (i.e. watching the streams). But I've since warmed up to the idea, and seeing how the existing community deals with this if deployed widely in the codebase is one of the more exiting aspects going forward. From my arm chair perspective, that is.

This is good for Jakt but why another language?

Why another OS? Why does anyone ever do anything?

It's all part of Andreas' grand plan for serenity OS.

Ask him about "the plan" next time he goes live :)

This post goes over his motivation: https://awesomekling.github.io/Memory-safety-for-SerenityOS/

>I have nothing bad to say about other languages. This is simply the option that makes the most sense for SerenityOS, which is fundamentally about having fun and implementing everything ourselves.

Kinda was expecting this but would've also liked see some critique of other languages.

I appreciate the honesty in the FAQ. No thread safety and still some open questions about iterator invalidation. I look forward to seeing what they come up with!

Borrow checker style "Aliasability XOR Mutability" does restrict a lot of valid programs, but has some nice properties for scaling large codebases besides the obvious performance advantage of ARC. I can see how this kind of big "down payment" to restructure programs might go against the incremental/fun approach embraced for SerenityOS. More reading on AXM and it's benefits for correctness:

* https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/17/the-problem-wi...

* http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/06/11/on-t...

* https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/03/where-rust-rea...

I haven't yet used it but from what I can tell seamless integration with existing C++ code might be quite a killer feature.

Plus everything immutable per default is pretty sweet.

And no borrow checker, so simpler than Rust.

Honestly I could see that language take off even outside of SerenityOS.

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