Ask HN: What is the killer app/library of your favorite language?

I liked the idea of [1] that many languages just get popular because they have killer apps. The prime examples are - Wordpress and PHP - Rails and Ruby

What are the killer apps of your favorite language? You can go for any language if you want to as well.

For me, Haskell has 3 great apps/libraries:

- PostgREST: An awesome way to create a REST-API from PostgreSQL tables

- Shellcheck: A static analysis tool for Shell scripts

- Pandoc: A parser/converter for various formats

How about you?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4

On the subject of PostgreSQL and although I haven't had to use it in several years, I'm quite fond of the OCaml extension I wrote which integrates PostgreSQL statements directly into the language.

Values are type-checked across the boundary, SQL commands are validated at compile time, and proper prepared statements get generated (also at compile time).

It's a little bit like MS Linq in concept, but it works quite differently - by using PGSQL "DESCRIBE" to send the statement to the PostgreSQL server when compiling the code to do the validation and get the types. It really made writing database-baked websites less of a grind. https://github.com/darioteixeira/pgocaml

The interesting languages are those that don't need killer apps to succeed.

Not a knock on WordPress at all, since it is ubiquitous. But for PHP I would say the "killer app" is actually Laravel.

I get why you think that, but I'd say that Wordpress was a different time.

Back when your Squarespace/Webflow/Wix didn't exist yet, this was a "great" no-code solution