roc

> In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. Meanwhile, some projects are doing the opposite, like going from Rust to Zig, here's an example from a podcast I recently listened to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXGf3oN2yU Here's the project in question: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc I think Bun just got a lot of visibility because of the speed and scope of the migration, which both shook things up and I guess was good PR cause that made a lot of headlines.

Roc defaults functions to being pure, and functions that can run side effects are inferred to have a different type by the compiler based on usage. By convention, their names should also end in `!` (e.g. `transform` for the name of a pure function and `transform!` if it does side effects), and the compiler warns you if you don't follow that convention. https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/b2503210da6b58a4ce1254d...

I maintain a ~250K LoC Zig compiler code base [0]. We've been through several breaking Zig releases (although the code base was much smaller for most of that time; Writergate is the main one we've had to deal with since the code base crossed the 100K LoC mark). The language and stdlib changing hasn't been a major pain point in at least a year or two. There was some upgrade a couple of years ago that took us awhile to land (I think it might have been 0.12 -> 0.13 but I could be misremembering the exact version) but it's been smooth sailing for a long time now. These days I'd put breaking releases in the "minor nuisance" category, and when people ask what I've liked and disliked about using Zig I rarely even remember to bring it up. [0]: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc

Unsafe Rust is problematic: https://zackoverflow.dev/writing/unsafe-rust-vs-zig See also: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/www/content/faq.md... Zig is not entirely unsafe. It provides quite a few compile time checks and primitives to catch memory leaks or prevent them altogether.

They recently changed the syntax to add parens, commas and use `|arg|` for closures :) https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/releases/tag/0.0.0-alpha2-ro...

For those following along https://github.com/roc-lang/roc https://github.com/multikitty/New-Programming-Languages-Show... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qzWm_eoUXM

I don't see how to make Single Page Apps, or really anything client side in Roc. I'm quite frustrated by https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/roc-for-elm-progra... which doesn't answer this which is the first question imo.

I'm not sure whether you've seen this, but we have settled on a specific design for sharing effectful code across platforms! https://docs.google.com/document/d/110MwQi7Dpo1Y69ECFXyyvDWz... As you noted, a few other changes to tasks and modules need to land before we can ship that. There are currently PRs in progress to implement those changes, e.g. https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/pull/6658 and https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/pull/6683

Their FAQ is an eminently reasonable breakdown of their choices: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/FAQ.md I don't fully agree with all of the reasoning, but it's a reasonable position to stake.

Absolutely! More details: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/ad5ed57c4202f847cf9e215...

Having a play with Gleam right now. Roc's managed effects sounds interesting, maybe Gleam could layer something similar atop Erlang's OTP? Right now, outside a database, it's not clear to this newbie how state is meant to be managed in Misty, the Gleam web framework I am kicking the tyres of. If I can be bothered, I was seeing myself having to delegate state management to a separate process (which Gleam seems to support well, but it's work I didn't anticipate and I am at this stage only playing). Edit: related to state management, the "platform" concept looks interesting too https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/wiki/Roc-concepts-explained#...

Oops, that's a bug - just opened an issue for it: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/issues/6027 Thanks for pointing it out!

Wow, this is depressing to read. :( 5 years ago I was upset and posted a comment that was unfairly harsh to another commenter. I apologized at the time, and I meant it. I definitely should not have made the harsh comment that I did. It was wrong. There's no excuse for my having written it. There are a lot of people working on Roc other than me. I'm not even the top committer anymore. [0] I hope you can find it in your heart to give their work some consideration, if not mine. [0] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/graphs/contributors

Reminds me of: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/FAQ.md#why-doesnt-...