I've done some hobby programming[1] in Jakt and while it had promise and took good ideas from other modern languages my understanding is that it's been abandoned at this point and isn't mature enough to build anything non-trivial.
Transpiling to C++ for maximum interop with the SerenityOS codebase was an interesting idea too, but what it meant was you had to interpret C++ compiler errors to to understand what was breaking a lot of the time
It's always nice to see others programming in Jakt. I've written a couple of network device drivers (rtl8139, virtio-net) and a TCP/IP stack in Jakt that is used in my TempleOS fediverse server project[1].
I also contributed some patches to Sophia's jaktnesmonster NES emulator a few years back, adding support for some popular mappers, as well as a TempleOS port, and more recently wired everything up[2][3] to use Serenity's native libraries (LibGUI, LibAudio, etc.)
I was pretty excited about this, but didn't the Serenity browser recently announce they're going with Swift? That kind of takes the wind out of this language's sails.
They came to it through a pretty pragmatic process. They made a list of candidate languages (they haven't discussed what the list was beyond "all the obvious candidates were represented") and assigned existing parts of the codebase to a few engineers asking them to reimplement the feature in the candidate languages. The team found they enjoyed working with Swift the most, and Swift's good support for OOP fit the object model of a web browser very well.
The C++ interop story for Swift isn't the most clear cut, though. You're forced to use Apple's fork of llvm (meaning no GNU or mainline clang support) and there are issues tracking the current blockers[0]. Along with other related issues under the "swift" tag[1]. I don't think this was necessarily a bad technical decision, but from a lock-in and practicality perspective it seems flawed.
Sure but that is already another criteria set, similar to how Carbon is also being developed, and not a plain "doesn't do OOP", because Java OOP is not the only flavour in town, which many folks conflate OOP with.
Not only does it predate the language by a few decades, there is enough type systems variants to chose from.
I haven't worked with it myself but my understanding is that Swift's C++ interop has improved a lot recently and is continuing to be improved. Apple has a huge C++ codebase so they are incentivized to make Swift work well with it
polling enjoyment is superbly pragmatic! this is a volunteer project that depends critically on the developers continuing to enjoy working on it. once you get past the first cut of "is this a reasonably mature language with a lot of community support behind it that compiles to fast native executables", enjoyment is one of the best ways you can choose between the various candidates. you can pretty much assume that rust/c++/swift/go/kotlin/etc all have the cross-platform support and libraries you will need.
It seems like Andreas abandoned SerenityOS and Jakt with it, and moved on to Ladybird. The language died with this move. The project was always very clearly “for fun” so I don’t see any harm or foul here. I also got the sense that there was a falling out between Andreas and some members of the community, like JT and one of the major JavaScript engine contributors whose name I can’t recall right now. Or maybe it was just that the passion for this particular project dried up.
I was never active in SerenityOS and only watched things from afar, but JT had a transition and I got the sense that the other contributor just got busy with life. That said, SerenityOS was a 'for us by us' mostly fun project that became too big and collapsed under its own weight without Andreas. Andreas is a great programmer and seems like genuinely nice person, but over time he was becoming more of a programmer influencer and since seems to have transitioned to PM/EM with full-time Ladybird. I miss his videos, they taught me I never want to write C++ and that splitting a giant work in tiny changes works and that programming videos are tiktok for programmers.
Which is to say, falling out with Andreas IMO is less than likely, dude just seems nice from the onset, but with changing tides in project it is highly likely that people just became uninterested over time.
I thought Sophia officially closed down working on both Nushell and Jakt, but it appears I mis-remembered: it was Nushell and another language named June.
I'm shocked by that they took the class/struct differentiation from swift. I HATED it when I had to deal with it in the past when working with swift. What's wrong with letting the programmer take the reference whenever they want to? Why do I have to change the whole class when I find something that makes me think it's better to have it passed by value? Why do I have to deal with the complexity of 2 kinds of custom types, with all the existing delicacies of a modern type system? Why on the earth would someone think this is a good idea that is worth taking? Can someone educate me on this?
My feeling is that if Swift didn't have the requirement of very tight interop with Objective-C there would have only been one kind of object. Maybe just structs with the option of heap allocation/reference counting or something like that.
But that's not the world Swift was born into and so it has both classes that are optionally Obj-C compatible and structs
- C#, Swift, Julia, Nim, Crystal, and very recently OCaml have separate value types and reference types. The choice is not orthogonal, which is what you don't like. (Java, Python, etc. do not have value types at all)
- Only Go and D have the memory model of C (values and references), with GC.
- Rust has also has the model of C, but with "static memory management"
Ladybird is no longer part of the SerenityOS project, and Jakt seems pretty dormant; my understanding is that Ladybird is moving to Swift as an eventual C++ replacement.
Seems pretty popular already, but I have missed this. What's the USP of Jakt over something like native c++, rust or zig? I don't really see the need, would love to hear from someone who knows
I think Andreas and JT wanted something that would tightly integrate/interop with the large existing C++ SerenityOS codebase. I think they also welcomed the opportunity to build a new language, consistent with the SerenityOS ethos of building every part of their OS themselves.
Sooner or later there will inevitably appear a new language, or an evolution of the current Rust, which will be significantly better than Rust and not just a minor tweak to the language we know today . Let’s say it is named Rust++ (any resemblance to existing languages is a pure coincidence). And the whole hype and rewrite starts over again… it is just a matter of time.
I don’t know. There’s trade offs everywhere. Rust std file interface is ugly and meh. Intermediate buffers everywhere.
Async await and unwrap is ugly.
Lambdas and binding of locals is very ugly as well. Any fake lifetime errors I get are solved by a data type and impl which is just confusing, as if lambdas are a problem.
Transpiling to C++ for maximum interop with the SerenityOS codebase was an interesting idea too, but what it meant was you had to interpret C++ compiler errors to to understand what was breaking a lot of the time
1: Here's my admittedly crappy markdown->HTML converter written in Jakt https://github.com/mikeakers/r3gen