> Its first use case is for the Diem blockchain...
Where is this 'Diem' blockchain? I can't find this anywhere or use it at all, so this essentially means that there is no use case for this language.
The amount of time we are wasting on blockchains can be directed toward other meaningful endeavours such as climate change, privacy friendly tech and technologies that push humanity forward.
This however is a spawn of a failed project that isn't even used in any production capacity and is a complete failure.
I've said on a few forums that when I first basically just glanced at Solidity, the language for Ethereum, just scanning through the spec, I found a good 4 or 5 things instantly wrong with it for such an important use case, some of which have gone on to be the root cause of serious hacks. I've only scanned over this, but this is a lot closer to something I'd expect for contracts.
As a simple for instance, integer overflow aborts. You can quibble with whether that's exactly what it should do (especially since it seems aborts can't be recovered, which means a contract that starts aborting is basically dead?), but in a blockchain contract what it definitely shouldn't do is simply wrap around without any error or signal or something that says "hey, this is pretty suspicious".
Not endorsing this, haven't studied it that deeply, but it at least passes the "does scanning over it reveal a ton of problems immediately?" test.
If this combines with transactional semantics, which is table stakes for a language like this, then yes, any exceptional state which isn't accounted for should be equivalent to nothing whatsoever happening over the entire state change the contract was enacting.
If only Solidity worked that way. But I guess databases weren't an important thing to study.
It was more the complete inability to catch aborts that caught my eye. Aborting strikes me as a good enough default, but I might like to be able to recover from something bad happening. In the particular case of math you can still write a plus that detects whether it would overflow first, but in general catching aborts seems like a good bit of functionality.
Personally, if I were writing a serious language like this I'd consider turning all + operations into things that return two results, one for the result and one for if it succeeded. Do it Go-style, do it with a Result type, I don't much care. The point is just that in the context of something like this, bringing it to the programmer's attention that + is not a safe operation on every usage is probably worth it. I reluctantly concede it is overkill in normal languages, but if there is ever a time to bite that bullet and make them do a full Result-style unpacking on every arithmetic operation, it's here.
> Welcome to Move, a next generation language for secure, sandboxed, and formally verified programming.
I didn't see anything about formal verification in the rest of the documentation. Does it have dependent types? Does it have a model checker? Does it have anything that would allow me to verify mathematical properties of my code?
Minor nitpick, but give this is a FB project where they should have hired very smart thinkers at the intersection of economics and CS:
> Move makes resources a first class primitive in the language, and enforces many invariants useful for scarce values
The key attribute of Cryptocurrency token (and money, in general) isn't that they are scarce, they are rivalrous. Arbitrary groups of people can't "use" them at the same time.
It's funny how as an example even Javascript muddied its own waters. Everybody gets this wrong, we need only look at .Net for a big institution screwing it up. I look forward to the new wave of programming languages that are straight up just symbols.
Where is this 'Diem' blockchain? I can't find this anywhere or use it at all, so this essentially means that there is no use case for this language.
The amount of time we are wasting on blockchains can be directed toward other meaningful endeavours such as climate change, privacy friendly tech and technologies that push humanity forward.
This however is a spawn of a failed project that isn't even used in any production capacity and is a complete failure.