DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language [LWN.net]

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 3:20 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566)
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

I wouldn't dismiss it offhand, but I've been burned before by languages releasing to much self-generated fanfare years before they're actually ready. The announcement seems a lot more polished than the language itself; the blurb's making some tall boasts for something with a spec document full of "section missing"s (and no spectests at all?)

Maybe in a year or two...

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DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 6:59 UTC (Mon) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not 1.0 yet, and that comes with some obvious caveats. However, it is useful for many kinds of systems programs, has a pretty broad and mostly mature standard library, only a small number of non-disruptive future language changes planned, and lots of docs. There's no test suite to explicitly measure conformance against the (draft!) specification, but the compiler and standard library both have plenty of tests, some of which do directly verify their behavior against the spec.

So yes, it's still a work in progress, and that comes with its caveats, but it's also a lot more fleshed out than you might expect. We're planning on putting a lot of work into 1.0, more than most languages do, because we plan to feature freeze it there. We might have released 1.0 much sooner if not for that.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 3, 2022 17:05 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, I noticed a complete absence on the site of any kind of version number; it'd be unfair to put it on blast this early on. Those ones I got burned by *did* make a big deal of being "done"...

You've (all) built something interesting here, it works (seems like a few people disagree with how it _should_ work, but that's language design for you), and I appreciate it being its own thing and not just another LLVM frontend. I think it has a decent chance of going somewhere.

Why not LLVM

Posted May 4, 2022 5:44 UTC (Wed) by cbushey (guest, #142134) [Link]

What would be wrong with having it be a LLVM front end?

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 15:07 UTC (Mon) by beagnach (guest, #32987) [Link]

> I've been burned before by languages releasing to much self-generated fanfare years before they're actually ready

It's pretty much a necessity to get a language into the wider world before it's actually ready.

I think any reasonably experienced developer will be well aware of the implications of a pre 1.0 version no

And is Hare any worse than, say, Rust pre 1.0?