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It's a pity ATS doesn't get more attention in the "Systems programming language" field. It can call into C, be called from C, provides a powerful type system, and can be used to write very low level code. I've written a few posts about how ATS can interact with C on my weblog here: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/tags/ats/

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I like reading your blog posts on ATS, but I don't think I could use it effectively.

I've had much better luck with exhaustive testing with Klee and related libraries (e.g. for testing multi-threaded programs).

For whatever reason, they map better to how I think about problems, and I've found it easier to develop new code that is testable within those constraints.

If you start off treating ATS like an ML variant interfacing with C without using any of the type annotations for safety you can go far. Then you can tighten the types up for safety as you get more experienced or find you need it.

You could write tests as needed and when a test fails write types that make that failure as close to compile time as possible.

Another approach is to just write C code, either embedded in ATS files or in C files that are linked into ATS. Then slowly convert C to ATS as you feel comfortable.

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