MoonBit: First Look at New Language Through Building WASM Back End

[jdegoes]

https://blog.vigoo.dev/posts/moonbit-with-golem/

[yencabulator]

Looks like they claim to be "open source" while the license is most definitely not open source.

https://www.moonbitlang.com/blog/compiler-opensource

> Why are we open-sourcing the Wasm backend?

> Modifications to the compiler are allowed for non-commercial purposes.

[mirekrusin]

Beautiful language - feels like Rust with sparkle of OCaml with TypeScript ease of use.

It's by Hongbo Zhang of Bloomberg's BuckleScript fame (used by Reason/ReScript) – he knows what he's doing together with the team it seems.

Thank you for opening first core libraries and recently compiler itself.

I'm voting with two hands for this initiative to create open and sustainable ecosystem around language.

[jauntywundrkind]

Nice seeing a hands on use case like this!

Glad to see MoonBit has wasm components / component-model support! Being able to use MoonBit with other langs greatly heightens the chance of folks being able to use it, imo. https://www.moonbitlang.com/blog/component-model

[fuzzythinker]

Don't see it linked to moonbit site, but https://github.com/moonbit-community has a few moonbit repos to look at.

[coffee_am]

Nice, but why create yet another language, that doesn't introduce no real gains over existing ones ? It's not even a research effort ...

All modern languages will compile to WASM as well, that is not a new feature.

I'm failing to see the selling point here -- but I only looked at the first pages of the documentation, and some of the tutorial.

And lacking anything really new, I'd rather see efforts to improve existing languages :)

[tln → from-nibly]

The first sentence of that article says the language "has been open sourced a few weeks ago". Moonbit is on Github with SSPL, so not quite open source.

[janice1999 → from-nibly]

Depends on the ecosystem. There are lots of scientific and engineering tools with their own languages. However National Instruments or Mathworks are not going to go away overnight.

[x0x0 → from-nibly]

is moonbit charging? I can't seem to find that on their site.

Separately, it seems like not a terrible plan. Better than eg hoping that Google and Oracle continue to care about the languages and runtimes they own. Go seems reasonably well used inside Google but Flutter is an open question, and the future of the jvm seems fraught with Oracle as its steward.

[la_fayette → x0x0]

Actually, I thought the same about flutter. As it seem to be a huge effort to maintain and further develop it. Even Dart seems to be only used for flutter development. The technology behind flutter is complex, similar to react native. If Google or Facebook would stop support for these tools, I think, it would be highly challenging for the open source community alone to maintain it. Facebook uses RN as part of their core products. However, I don't see the incentive for Google to maintain Flutter...

[azakai → x0x0]

> is moonbit charging?

I assume GP refers to the license of MoonBit, SSPL + exceptions, which is not generally considered fully open source.

https://www.moonbitlang.com/blog/compiler-opensource#why-a-r...

Usually this type of license is used to keep more profit options open, but it will slow down adoption.