Show HN: Darklang

> A really great new idea

This ain't exactly new, though. The value proposition here is very similar to that of a lot of existing cloud-hostable middleware products, e.g. Dell Boomi, albeit perhaps targeted at a different audience (that is: adapted to actually building backend systems instead of tying a bunch of existing systems together).

Boomi, however, is a flaming pile of trash (and I say this as someone whose dayjob is - among numerous other things - to maintain a bunch of Boomi processes); the version control sucks (and you have to use its version control, because what's Git or Mercurial or Fossil or even CVS, amirite?), it's way overpriced, it's a pain in the ass to do simple things with it (unless there's already a shape defined for the exact thing you're trying to do, or it happens to be something conducive to JS or Groovy scripting; the JS/Groovy escape hatch is the one good thing about Boomi), and you're permanently locked into it unless you want to completely rewrite everything in a different language and for a different platform.

If Dark can address those four problems - namely, by supporting external version control systems (Git at the minimum), having a sane price point (and not gouge users on connector licenses), making it easy to do easy things and reasonable to do hard things, and providing some pathway to escape vendor lock-in (e.g. import/export from/to a self-hosted option, preferably an open-source one) - then I could see myself at least trying it out. As it stands, though, there's no indication that Dark doesn't have the same exact crippling problems Boomi has (made worse by forcing a specific new language instead of relying on existing ones).

Conceptually, Dark is a game-changer. The question is: can you deliver on the details?

Can apps written in Dark scale to 10k LOC or will the browser UI get jittery? How many concurrent users can Dark apps handle? Do you integrate logging and metrics?

I hope you are making an iPad app. That would be truly next-level.

Go - OK, it has one implementation (open-source), but it's backed by one big player (Google) and used by many others... also the simplicity at core design decisions sound like the kind of choices that would make an alternative compiler easier to implement than for other languages

Rust - pretty fast growing open-source community despite only one implementation... but yeah I'm sort of worried that Rust is a "hard to implement" kind of language with maybe a not high enough bus factor... similar worries for Julia too

But tbh I'm not drawn much to either Go and Rust for other reasons - Go is too verbose for my taste, no way to write denser code that highlights the logic instead of the plumbing, and it has a "dumb" type system, Rust seems a really bad choice for rapid prototyping and iteration which is what I care about now.

EDIT+: glad to know that Go has multiple implementations in fact, pardon my ignorance!

I am the complete opposite ... I'm in my 40s and dark modes are the only thing I can use.

The bright white glare bothers my eyes and I can't work for hours staring into it. I have to go dark on everything these days.

Back to the light-on-dark computers I grew up with :)

Three counting google go, gcc-go and llvm-go. Last I checked the latter two were quite incomplete.