Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory • Hacker News Board

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#31

Post by rsyring » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 8:47 PM UTC

If you are interested in Gossamer, you may also be interested in Lis, which is Rust flavored and compiles to go: https://github.com/ivov/lisette

From their readme:

  Safe and expressive:

    - Hindley-Milner type system
    - Algebraic data types, pattern matching
    - Expression-oriented, immutable by default
    - Rust-like syntax plus |> operator and try blocks
    - Go-style interfaces, channels, goroutines

  Quietly practical:

    - Interop with Go ecosystem (WIP)
    - Linter, formatter, 250+ diagnostics
    - Fast incremental compiler, readable Go
    - LSP for VSCode, Neovim, Zed, Helix, GoLand

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#32

Post by charlieflowers » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

klardotsh wrote: post #16

throwrioawfo wrote: post #7

There was once a time when I'd see a page like this and think "wow, must be a great project with such a polished website". Now, it's just a neutral or perhaps even very slightly negative signal (especially the em-dash in the very first line of the page). Anyone able to tell me if this is a project actually worth paying attention to, or just another raindrop in the current monsoon of slop?

Somewhat with you on this. I got slightly excited for a brief moment, but then the site starts to scream "an LLM threw this together super quickly" which doesn't spark joy at all. I then started digging into the code examples and quickly determined that nothing about this project is for me, even as a fan of Rust and some of its influences it has on recent languages. That web routing example is absolutely gross to my…

The language choices demonstrate excellent taste though.

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#33

Post by mattkrause » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

klardotsh wrote: post #16

throwrioawfo wrote: post #7

There was once a time when I'd see a page like this and think "wow, must be a great project with such a polished website". Now, it's just a neutral or perhaps even very slightly negative signal (especially the em-dash in the very first line of the page). Anyone able to tell me if this is a project actually worth paying attention to, or just another raindrop in the current monsoon of slop?

Somewhat with you on this. I got slightly excited for a brief moment, but then the site starts to scream "an LLM threw this together super quickly" which doesn't spark joy at all. I then started digging into the code examples and quickly determined that nothing about this project is for me, even as a fan of Rust and some of its influences it has on recent languages. That web routing example is absolutely gross to my…

The web-routing thing is especially gross because a different example shows off pattern-matching.

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#34

Post by gf000 » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 9:03 PM UTC

samuell wrote: post #12

Glad to see more languages adopt true goroutines [edit: lightweight threads or fibers] with M:N scheduling. Surprised more haven't. Among compiled language I'm only aware of Go and Crystal off the top of my mind.

Haskell, Java

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#35

Post by etaioinshrdlu » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

rsyring wrote: post #31

If you are interested in Gossamer, you may also be interested in Lis, which is Rust flavored and compiles to go: https://github.com/ivov/lisette From their readme: Safe and expressive: - Hindley-Milner type system - Algebraic data types, pattern matching - Expression-oriented, immutable by default - Rust-like syntax plus |> operator and try blocks - Go-style interfaces, channels, goroutines Quietly practical: - Inter…

I would also like to toss my project into the ring, which also allows mixing most real-world Rust & Go packages together, on runtime & syntax compatible level. https://github.com/deepai-org/omnivm

Pardon the sloppy readme - it actually does work :)

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#36

Post by pantsforbirds » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

I'm fairly sure the code snippets aren't equal in the last python example:

```python names = sorted({name.lower() for name in users if name}) ```

vs.

Python is sorting a set (unique values only), but I'm not seeing a unique or set approach for gossamer.

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#37

Post by smj-edison » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #2

Gossamer has a cycle collector and eager reference counting. Good luck dropping the last reference to a 10,000-node graph, especially if cyclic. That means it doesn't have "pause free" memory. If you want pause freedom, go use ZGC or another modern GC on a modern VM. I just can't take seriously this spate of languages that ignore the past 30 years of research into automatic memory management. We have multiple open-so…

The one plus I'll give reference counting is it still takes the cake for interoperability with C. Which is only important if you need good interoperability, but when you do, tracing GCs don't play nice.

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#38

Post by sesteel » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 9:22 PM UTC

throwrioawfo wrote: post #7

There was once a time when I'd see a page like this and think "wow, must be a great project with such a polished website". Now, it's just a neutral or perhaps even very slightly negative signal (especially the em-dash in the very first line of the page). Anyone able to tell me if this is a project actually worth paying attention to, or just another raindrop in the current monsoon of slop?

Looks like we may be going to go back to the geocities days of primitive websites. I use still use hugo to generate my personal site automatically from markdown upon PR approval.

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#39

Post by IshKebab » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

It's only 2 months old. Clearly vibe coded. Still, kind of crazy what you can vibe code now.

Also the actual language design seems quite nice. I'd love something like this that was embeddable (and not vibe coded). There are basically no good easily embeddable languages. Everyone used Lua but it sucks.

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#40

Post by RedComet » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #8

iyn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have multiple open-source pauseless miracles GCs right there in front of us Can you share some links/references?

ZGC is extremely good work. https://wiki.openjdk.org/spaces/zgc/pages/34668579/Main > ZGC performs all expensive work concurrently, without stopping the execution of application threads for more than a millisecond. It is suitable for applications which require low latency. Pause times are independent of the heap size that is being used. ZGC works well with heap sizes from a few hundred megabytes to 16TB. Go's GC is a…

Are any of those actually pauseless like he asked for?