An update on Dart macros and data serialization

There are a bunch of other interesting approaches here they can look at. Improving the code generation story more generally, shopping the augmentations feature (basically C#’s partial classes) and getting more serious about serialization all feel like sensible directions from here.

There is a really interesting community proposal at the moment on the serialization front that I think would solve a lot of the issues that got people so excited about macros in the first place here: https://github.com/schultek/codable/blob/main/docs/rfc.md

Microsoft didn't want to compete with Sun so much as have an application development language with a garbage collector that wasn't owned by Sun.

You don't make much money off programming languages inherently.

This also elides an obvious riposte (so you mean they should have just used Mono? how did all that work out?) and a metric ton of differences between what C# targets and what Dart targets.

I'm pretty sure we did look at C# (and certainly a whole bunch of other languages). I don't actually recall why we didn't use C# at the time. I remember Go binaries were waaay to big, JS (what we originally wrote Flutter in) startup time was way too slow on iOS, Swift was too deeply tied to Apple (the standard library was closed source at that time), etc. It's possible that C# was too verbose or didn't have a path to hot reload? But that's just a guess. I'm not a C# expert, and Adam Barth drove most of the language evals at the time.

That said, I'm also not sure Miguel (creator of Xamarin) would agree. He's a Flutter fan now (and backer of Shorebird, my company).

Past discussions: https://x.com/migueldeicaza/status/1778759403451081159 https://x.com/migueldeicaza/status/1559898665350832128

But I don't recall seeing someone re-define `define` in real life.

Nor do I recall seeing any problematic redefinitions in Scheme in real life.

That said, if you wanted to make a language variant in which `define` did something different than normal (say, for instrumentation, or for different semantics for variable syntax), then you'd probably use Racket, and you'd probably define your own `#lang`, so that the first line of files using your language would be something like `#lang myfunkylang`.

You can randomly sample code in https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/>, and look for people doing anything other than `#lang racket/base` or `#lang typed/racket/base`.