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Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

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Re: Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

#91

Post by kiliankoe »

In the Top 10 there are only two languages which are not self-hosted. Swift with C++ and PHP with C.

I know the reasoning for Swift being that it's just not practical at this point reimplementing everything in Swift, but looking at the others it seems to be the norm to self-host your language at some point at least. Is there a reason for this? Is it just a rite of passage or do the maintainers obviously enjoy using the language itself as well?

Some languages chose to go this route right from the start (see Crystal for example), others might (hopefully) pick this up later (I'd love for Swift to be). Does anyone have any insight on this?

Re: Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

#92

Post by hueving »

kibwen wrote: post #23
xwowsersx wrote: post #10

Which of these projects has a truly open development process that takes place in public and on Github? Are most (or some) of these developed internally by whichever enterprise is behind the language where developers at those companies "bake" commits and then push them up after going through an internal code review process?

Rust is one that's developed in the open. Commits to Rust's master branch must be done through pull requests on Github. All PRs must be approved and reviewed before being merged, and the approver cannot be the same person who submitted the PR. Furthermore, major changes to the language must undergo an RFC process, which is also coordinated via a Github repo: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/ .

>Commits to Rust's master branch must be done through pull requests on Github. All PRs must be approved and reviewed before being merged, and the approver cannot be the same person who submitted the PR.

Any company that puts half an effort into open washing will follow these same procedures, so they aren't safe indicators that the real decisions aren't made behind closed doors ahead of time.

Paying close attention to things like the rfc process and approval process for commit rights and whatnot usually tell the real story.

Re: Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

#93

Post by ramchip »

kiliankoe wrote: post #91

In the Top 10 there are only two languages which are not self-hosted. Swift with C++ and PHP with C. I know the reasoning for Swift being that it's just not practical at this point reimplementing everything in Swift, but looking at the others it seems to be the norm to self-host your language at some point at least. Is there a reason for this? Is it just a rite of passage or do the maintainers obviously enjoy using t…

Elixir is not (fully) self-hosted either. There's interesting discussion on the mailing list about this: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elixir-lang-core/K9i3uBSPKZI...

Re: Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

#94

Post by hueving »

No offense, but this list is stupid in its current ordering if the order is meant to imply anything. I heavily use rust, python, and go and have not starred any of the repos because I have faith the current contributors and don't need to helicopter over current issues/PRs.

Stars are for following a project because you need to pay attention to breaking changes, bugs, and major feature releases. If you need to do that for a programming language, the language is immature, garbage, or both IMO.

Also, stars!=contributors, so an entire team of 1000 devs (!) could use github to fully develop a language and look worse off than many of these other examples that hardly use github at all.

Re: Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

#96

Post by transfire »

kiliankoe wrote: post #91

In the Top 10 there are only two languages which are not self-hosted. Swift with C++ and PHP with C. I know the reasoning for Swift being that it's just not practical at this point reimplementing everything in Swift, but looking at the others it seems to be the norm to self-host your language at some point at least. Is there a reason for this? Is it just a rite of passage or do the maintainers obviously enjoy using t…

> In the Top 10 there are only two languages which are not self-hosted.

I don't think that is true. Ruby is written in C, Elixir is built on Erlang and Clojure is built-on Java. In fact the only two I know for sure that are fully self-hosted are Crystal and Julia.

Re: Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

#98

Post by tyingq »

jeremiep wrote: post #50

Most of these languages are also bootstrapped! I wonder when we'll see Swift written in Swift. And I wonder what kind of monstrosity a PHP written in PHP would look like.

There's a php implemented php->AST parser here: https://github.com/nikic/PHP-Parser

Re: Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

#99

Post by hacker_9 »

kiliankoe wrote: post #91

In the Top 10 there are only two languages which are not self-hosted. Swift with C++ and PHP with C. I know the reasoning for Swift being that it's just not practical at this point reimplementing everything in Swift, but looking at the others it seems to be the norm to self-host your language at some point at least. Is there a reason for this? Is it just a rite of passage or do the maintainers obviously enjoy using t…

In the case of C#, their previous compiler was built in C/C++ and was apparently very hard to work with. Since rewriting in C# itself, named 'Roslyn', they were able to build it with immutable structures, as well as expose the whole API as a regular C# library. Now they are adding new features all the time and the IDE integration is even better.

It's also really powerful for users to just add the lib, and be able to immediately parse any C# solution with the official tools, get semantic info, errors, autocomplete info etc as well as compile scripts. You can get a mini visual studio up and running in a day.

I can even get the source off github, and continue working in my favourite language. I even did this and changed the parser round (removed need for semicolons, make the language whitespace sensitive) just as a learning exercise. It also gave me a bigger appreciation of functional programming, and how one can use immutable data structures when writing a compiler.

Edit: one of the devs even used it to make real time C# [1] ala Bret Victor style.

[1] http://comealive.io/Tracing-Code-Execution-with-Alive/

Re: Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

#100

Post by yoz-y »

kiliankoe wrote: post #91

In the Top 10 there are only two languages which are not self-hosted. Swift with C++ and PHP with C. I know the reasoning for Swift being that it's just not practical at this point reimplementing everything in Swift, but looking at the others it seems to be the norm to self-host your language at some point at least. Is there a reason for this? Is it just a rite of passage or do the maintainers obviously enjoy using t…

I guess some languages are not meant to be used to write compilers. I a certain way it would make sense to not try to self-host your language at all prices. If you do, you may end up adding features that are outside the original philosophy. I feel that we already have enough universal, system languages. Thus, languages that try to tackle very specific problems seem more useful to me.
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