Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

The lang I want would be mixture of C, C++, Go, Rust, Julia, JavaScript 6, PHP 7, Swift, Lua.

  * Optional typing (like PHP7/Hack/ES7)
  * support for compilation (statically linked native
    binaries) and JIT (like Visual Basic 6 with its P-Code)
  * memory safety (no null/dangling pointers like Rust)
  * procedural & object oriented & functional style 
    (like JavaScript/PHP/C++)
  * modern base standard library / API (like 
    C/Go/JavaScript/PHP but more modern with better naming, 
    not as heavy as Java class libraries or .Net Framework)
  * third party libraries (like Nodejs NPM)
  * online documentation with code samples and 
    community comments (like PHP.net)
  * good debugger
  * IDE plugins for IDEA/Eclipse/VS
  * good OS support (32 & 64bit) for:
    Windows & OSX & Linux & BSD & iOS & Android.

Edit:

  * Actor model (like Erlang)
  * Built-in concurrency primitives:
    ° light-weight processes (like Fibers in WinAPI, 
      Coroutine in Lua, Goroutine in Go), 
    ° Channels (interprocess communication and 
      synchronization via message passing like in Go 
      and OCaml)

You might want to check out Dart (https://www.dartlang.org)

* Optional types

* The VM compiles source into machine code on the fly, or you can embed the VM into your app.

* No pointers.

* Core library is full-featured (https://api.dartlang.org/apidocs/channels/stable/dartdoc-vie...)

* Third-party libs and packages in https://pub.dartlang.org

* Docs at api.dartlang.org and www.dartdocs.org

* Debugger works in Eclipse, IntelliJ, WebStorm

* Works in Win, Mac, Linux, 32 and 64 bit.

* Also runs on ARM and MIPs

* Isolates for memory-safe concurrency

* Async primitives like Future, Stream, and async/await

(disclaimer: I'm a PM on the Dart team)

Other than IDE plugins for other IDE's, I think Racket has most of this covered.

I don't however think that's what was desired.

D?

Hadn't it boast itself as a C++ replacement(which pissed off the C++ community=bad rap), I think it would have been a very good candidate. D minus all the unsafe features looks better than Go, IMHO. Go lack of expressiveness forces developers into copy/paste mode.

The language closest to what you have described I believe is Dart, but it does have a VM.

"modern base API", what does that mean?

I meant "language standard library" (I updated the text).

C/C++/Object-C/PHP have short functions with names like strlen, strstr, etc. Java/C#/JavaScript have .length() and things like System.out.println()/Console.Write(). Ideally, I would like a middle ground. The Java/C# standard library is too verbose and the C standard functions are a bit cryptic.

It's great one can use different programming styles in JavaScript/PHP/C++. In PHP many functions are available in procedural and object oriented style, e.g. http://php.net/manual/en/mysqli.query.php

My own point of view is biased, admittedly, but I couldn't stop thinking that Common Lisp was relevant for each item in your list.

Of course, much isn't built-in, but this is not as bad as it sounds: concurrent channels are not part of the language specification, but you can install the "calispel" or "cl-actors" libraries that gives you what looks like primitive constructs.

Regarding "modern" languages, I like this quote from the author of pgloader: "I switched from Python to Lisp because I wanted a modern language" (also transcribed as: "[...] in searching for a modern programming language the best candidate I found was actually Common Lisp."; see http://tapoueh.org/blog/2014/05/14-pgloader-got-faster.html)

I would add the Actor model of Erlang.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com