@jenniferplusplus @lunarood Oh, I thought it was about #Haskell .

Isn't this mainly a problem from the (main) compiler(s) not having a stable ABI? Or is it deeper than that?

I can certainly understand not trying to match the "C ABI", but it would be nice if we didn't have to update (almost) every Haskell package in #Debian in lock-step.

@profoundlynerdy just because something has types doesn’t make it Haskell-like. Haskell’s type system is in the family of Lambda Calculii (the “Lambda Cube”) which is called “System-F”.

I don’t know much about Raku, but it seems to me to me to be a bit more similar to TypeScript. And what differentiates TypeScript from other languages: it takes a horrible programming language like JavaScript and makes it less bad by giving it a type system, likewise Raku makes Perl less bad in the exact same way. (Sorry, I’m not trying to be impolite, but JavaScript and Perl are objectively, truly awful, horrible programming languages.)

So I see both Raku and TypeScript only being useful to a company buried in the technical debt of a hugely profitable production application that was very unwisely written in a dynamically typed language (Perl or JavaScript), which then unfortunately grew to millions of lines of code, and now it can’t be maintained by anyone, and it could never possibly be rewritten from the ground-up in a good programming language like Haskell for any reasonable sum of money. So Raku and TypeScript both offer a half-measure solution to that problem: make the maintenance of horrible computer code a bit easier with a type system.

Haskell was never intended as a fix for horrible code, it took a really good experimental programming language called Miranda and turned it into something that you can use to do real, practical software engineering, and it does it better than any other language ever invented. You write a system in Haskell because you know up front that you want it to be stable and maintained in a cost-effective manner for decades.

Zig is not similar to Raku or Haskell. It is more analogous to what Scala does for Java. Java is already statically typed, but Scala’s type system is better, and it’s runtime is fully compatible with Java. Likewise, Zig is fully compatible with the C language runtime, but provides a slightly different, slightly better static type checking system than the C type system. Zig also solves a bunch of other problems that C has by providing it with modern features like namespaces and modules, which makes it much easier to use than C. Zig is the perfect way to replace old C code with something more modern, but only if you don’t need it to be as rigorously correct as Rust. I think Zig would be a nice language to use to replace non-safety-critical front-end libraries like Gtk, or maybe for things like game engines.