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The Borgo Programming Language

borgo-lang.github.io

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Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#91

Post by weinzierl »

polyaniline wrote: post #32
weinzierl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It literally addresses every major complaint people have with Go." It addresses complaints 1 to n but does nothing about complaint 0: Having a garbage collector with all its associated downsides.

If it skipped the GC wouldn't it just be Rust?

Valid question, but no. Borgo takes inspiration from Rust but is still a vastly different language. Even though it has algebraic data types its type system is not Rust's. Another big difference is that it sticks with Go's interfaces instead of traits.

I think Borgo sits at an interesting place in the design space. I just believe there are vast plains of unsettled land in the strongly typed GC-less direction and a language that really addressed all complaints about Go would have live there.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#93

Post by cwalv »

Aldipower wrote: post #78
kjksf wrote: post #6

I love it. This is a language that everyone here says they want but no one will use, even though it's stable and mature (I assume because it compiles to stable and mature Go and can use every existing Go library). It hits all the "ok, Go is popular but made by morons for morons and if only it had this X advanced feature, it would be totally great". It has immutability. It has advanced enums. It has algebraic types. I…

JavaScript had Netscape behind it, TypeScript has Microsoft behind it, Rust had Mozilla behind it, Go has Google behind it, Java had Sun behind it, C++ had AT&T behind it, and so on.. Borgo? Cannot think about much languages that haven't any bigger company behind it. PHP maybe? To an extend Python? But today Python good pushed by the big companies of the AI hype.

In my mind the fact that Go has Google behind it is the main reason it caught on (and quickly). It would have been completely ignored otherwise.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#94

Post by pjmlp »

nine_k wrote: post #90
pjmlp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that JVM community welcomes languages PhD folks. There is even the JVM Languages Summit. Unthinkable in Go ecosystem.

Maybe because Go is not a VM?

Java compiles to native code for two decades now, it has always been a matter of how much one was willing to pay for a commercial JDK.

“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”

-- Rob Pike

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#95

Post by cwalv »

tucnak wrote: post #12
kjksf wrote: post #6

I love it. This is a language that everyone here says they want but no one will use, even though it's stable and mature (I assume because it compiles to stable and mature Go and can use every existing Go library). It hits all the "ok, Go is popular but made by morons for morons and if only it had this X advanced feature, it would be totally great". It has immutability. It has advanced enums. It has algebraic types. I…

> made by morons for morons The creators of Go have also built the foundation of everything you take for granted. The real "harsh truth" here, of course, is that the Go team exhibits engineering genius, taste, and particularity that is rare to find in our industry, such that the likes of Rust "death by committee" people may only dream of. The long-lasting obsession that Rust people have with Go and the Go team has be…

> The creators of Go have also built the foundation of everything you take for granted

Is it the foundation because it was built a long time ago, and is "good enough" .. or because it's just really good? "Worse is better" comes to mind.

There was another post on hn today about "pipelines getting stuck" that was really just about poor interaction between pipelines and programs changing their buffering behavior based on `istty()`. bash has been around a long time, and will stay around for a long time still, but that doesn't mean its design leaves nothing to be desired. It just means the benefits of changing it haven't crossed the 10x threshold of the costs (partially because it's foundational).

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#96

Post by cwalv »

arethuza wrote: post #50
darthrupert wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust with GC is actually what many people want. And by that I don't mean using Rc everywhere nor do I even mean making a GC library and then using GC everywhere. I mean having the runtime handle all memory things with you having to think about it only when some extremely rare corner case breaks.

That sounds like C#? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/memory-and...

C# was derided as "Microsoft's Java" from the beginning, even though it pulled ahead very early on with generics and never looked back. Microsoft was loathed by many for a long time. Go is popular because Google is (was?) loved/admired.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#97

Post by cmrdporcupine »

kjksf wrote: post #6

I love it. This is a language that everyone here says they want but no one will use, even though it's stable and mature (I assume because it compiles to stable and mature Go and can use every existing Go library). It hits all the "ok, Go is popular but made by morons for morons and if only it had this X advanced feature, it would be totally great". It has immutability. It has advanced enums. It has algebraic types. I…

The issues with language adoption come down to tooling, libraries, and community.

Just because it's compatible with Go doesn't mean that 3rd party Go dependencies will be a natural fit for it.

Existing IDEs and other tooling won't work.

Community is unlikely to grow.

etc

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#99

Post by rererereferred »

diggan wrote: post #28
bmacho wrote: post #24

Looks similar to Haxe (and to the language that C++/Java/Python/TypeScript/etc are converging). Now give it to google, release it as .go2, and make it frictionless to use Go and Go2 in a codebase.

> Now give it to google, release it as .go2, and make it frictionless to use Go and Go2 in a codebase. Has Google ever "taken" an already created project under their wing and ran with it? AFAIK, Google only does the opposite and releases projects from their grips, but never the opposite. "Everything Google does, Google must invent" is how it looks like from the outside at least.

They've bought and kept running many projects. YouTube, Writely (now google docs), Android to name a few.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#100

Post by autarch »

nine_k wrote: post #81
Philpax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the impediment to adoption is the syntax - that's straightforward enough - it's the ecosystem / tooling / network effects. I love this, even though I don't interact with Go on a regular basis, but I recognise that I'd be locking myself out of a lot of the standard Go tooling if I adopted this wholesale. For better or for worse, there's a high ecosystem barrier that most languages must overcome to be ado…

What standard tooling would fail, given that the translation goes via a a generated Go source? I suppose there must be some borgofmt that handles the particular syntax. Certainly debuggers would have to be updated to show the corresponding Borgo code line at least. What else?

> What else?

Any and all linters for Go, to start. In theory, you could run them on the transpiled source, but the results would be very hard to apply to the original Borgo code. And they'd probably produce lots of false positives for things that the Borgo compile ensures are safe, even if they're not linting-correct.

And syntax highlighting, refactoring tools, an LSP server. I'm sure there are more things along these lines I'm failing to think of.

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