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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

The site compares it to Rust and Go but to me the comparison is AssemblyScript. It’s also WASM-native and new with relatively little ecosystem around it. But compared to Moonbit it’s a familiar language to anyone that’s used TypeScript. So why use Moonbit over AssemblyScript?

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Because Moonbit is a modern language, while AssemblyScript is carrying forward the mistakes of the past. For example, Moonbit supports pattern matching and most language constructs are expressions. AS doesn't have pattern matching and consists primarily of statements. Moonbit has algebraic data types; it's not clear to me that AS does.

There might be other differences at runtime, but it's difficult to tell from just the website.

Go is also an old-school statement based language though.

I was responding to the question "So why use Moonbit over AssemblyScript?"

> Because Moonbit is a modern language, while AssemblyScript is carrying forward the mistakes of the past.

No language has "no mistakes".

For instance, let's take a language like Scala, which appeared 20 years ago. Has it avoided mistakes of the past? Or lets take Rust, which appeared 8 years ago. Is it "perfect"? Same with Moonbit; it will make tradeoffs and mistakes and whatnot.

Mistakes are not always technical in nature either. They can be mistakes in positioning, strategy, community, governance, poor documentation, etc.

Modern doesn't imply perfect— just that it uses recent advancements.

In most conversations, TypeScript generally seems to be considered a fairly "modern" language. TypeScript offers a variety of rather advanced type system features, and AssemblyScript is based on it, so by extension, AssemblyScript should be fairly "modern" too.

Based on the limited docs that are available[0], Moonbit appears to be using C++-style "generics" that are just simple template substitutions (no constraints), which is far less "modern" than what TypeScript offers.

Honestly, I don't think imprecise words like "modern" are particularly useful, helpful, or good for discussions like this. "Pattern matching" has been a feature of certain programming languages for decades, so is that truly a "modern" feature?

[0]: https://moonbitlang.com/docs/syntax/#generics

I'm not saying it's any more modern than any other language— I pointed out that being imperfect doesn't preclude modernity. Nobody even claimed it was perfect to begin with.

Looks much closer to Grain [1] than AssemblyScript

1. https://grain-lang.org/

I think the Rust and Go comparisons are because they’re popular languages with first class WASM support but I agree

Why didn't they include Zig and AsssemblyScript, then?

No clue, maybe they performed too well :p

Not OP, but although Zig is pretty good, it is arguably a relatively low-level language for application development. Thinking about pointers, for example, is tiring and unnecessary for most apps.

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