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Show HN: The Mog Programming Language

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Re: Show HN: The Mog Programming Language

#21

Post by belisarius222 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #4

I like the looks of this, and the idea behind it, but TypeScriot via Deno is an audited language with a good security model, a good type system, and sandboxing in an extremely well-hardened runtime. It's also a language that LLMs are exceptionally well-trained on. What does Mog offer that's meaningfully superior in an agent context? I see that Deno requires a subprocess which introduces some overhead, and I might be…

I generally agree. TypeScript is a great language, and JS runtimes have certainly had a lot of money and effort poured into them for a long time. I would add WASM to this category, as probably the closest thing to Mog. Write a program in some language, compile it to WASM, and load it into the host process. This is (probably) nice and safe, and relatively performant.

Since it's new, Mog will likely not yet beat existing systems at basically anything. Its potential lies in having better performance and a much smaller total system footprint and complexity than the alternatives. WASM is generally interpreted -- you can compile it, but it wasn't really designed for that as far as I know.

More generally, I think new execution environments are good opportunities for new languages that directly address the needs of that environment. The example that comes to mind is JavaScript, which turned webpages into dynamically loaded applications. AI agents have such heavy usage and specific problems that a language designed to be both written and executed by them is worth a shot in my opinion.

Re: Show HN: The Mog Programming Language

#22

Post by belisarius222 »

Garlef wrote: post #17

Awesome! A few questions: - Is there a list of host languages? - Can it live in the browser? (= is JS one of the host languages?)

The host is written in Rust, with `extern "C"`, which makes it able to be loaded as a C library by programs written in other languages. Most languages have support for this.

It's also designed to be run in an event loop. I've tested this with Bun's event loop that runs TypeScript. I haven't tried it with other async runtimes, but it should be doable.

As for the browser, I haven't tried it, but you might be able to compile it to WASM -- the async stuff would be the hardest part of that, I suspect. Could be cool!

Re: Show HN: The Mog Programming Language

#24

Post by sjrd »

belisarius222 wrote: post #21
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #4

I like the looks of this, and the idea behind it, but TypeScriot via Deno is an audited language with a good security model, a good type system, and sandboxing in an extremely well-hardened runtime. It's also a language that LLMs are exceptionally well-trained on. What does Mog offer that's meaningfully superior in an agent context? I see that Deno requires a subprocess which introduces some overhead, and I might be…

I generally agree. TypeScript is a great language, and JS runtimes have certainly had a lot of money and effort poured into them for a long time. I would add WASM to this category, as probably the closest thing to Mog. Write a program in some language, compile it to WASM, and load it into the host process. This is (probably) nice and safe, and relatively performant. Since it's new, Mog will likely not yet beat existi…

Wasm is definitely designed to be compiled, either ahead of time or JITed. Wasm interpreters are few and far between.

Re: Show HN: The Mog Programming Language

#26

Post by verdverm »

andreybaskov wrote: post #7
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #4

I like the looks of this, and the idea behind it, but TypeScriot via Deno is an audited language with a good security model, a good type system, and sandboxing in an extremely well-hardened runtime. It's also a language that LLMs are exceptionally well-trained on. What does Mog offer that's meaningfully superior in an agent context? I see that Deno requires a subprocess which introduces some overhead, and I might be…

It's a legitimate question to ask about any new language post AI - given there is no training dataset, any other language would work better with AI. The bigger problem is maintainability over the long term, Deno is built by Node.js creator and is maintained for half a decade now, that's hard to compete with. In a way it's much more about social trust rather than particular syntax.

I'd also add all the other things that users expect around a language:

- GitHub syntax highlighting

- IDE integrations, LSP

- Modules and dependency management

I don't see an agent first language becoming a thing while humans are still ultimately responsible.

Re: Show HN: The Mog Programming Language

#27

Post by saithound »

> When asking people to write code in a language, these restrictions could be onerous. But LLMs don't care, and the less expressivity you trust them with, the better.

But LLMs very much do care. They are measurably worse when writing code in languages with non-standard or non-existent operator precedence. This is not surprising given how they learn programmming.

Re: Show HN: The Mog Programming Language

#29

Post by sjrd »

belisarius222 wrote: post #20
Retr0id wrote: post #13

> Compiled to native code for low-latency plugin execution – no interpreter overhead, no JIT, no process startup cost. If you're running the compiled code in-process, how is that not JIT? And isn't that higher-latency than interpreting? Tiered-JIT (a la V8) solves exactly this problem. Edit: Although the example programs show traditional AOT compile/execute steps, so "no process startup cost" is presumably a lie?

Mog is AOT-compiled, not JIT'd. JIT means the code is interpreted until some condition kicks in to trigger compilation. This is obviously common and provides a number of advantages, but it has downsides too: 1) Code might run slowly at first. 2) It can be difficult to predict performance -- when will the JIT kick in? How well will it compile the code? With Mog, you do have to pay the up-front cost of compiling the pr…

Hum, IIRC, using your definition of an AOT compiler, then V8 is an AOT compiler. V8 never interprets code. It immediately compiles it to machine code. It improves it later, but it's never slow.
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