Comment by aeldidi
5 years ago
I remember reading something particularly negative about terra in 2019[1]. Although I haven’t used terra at all since the time I first tried it (not long after I read the above mentioned article), I think it’s relevant to mention that at least at one point, terra has had major problems regarding design. If anyone has used terra in any non-trivial capacity I’d love to hear what your experience with it has been like.
I develop Regent, a programming language for distributed computing based on Terra [1]. We're one of the larger (largest?) Terra codebases and indirect source of users.
(I also help maintain Terra, but this answer is more focused on my capacity as a user.)
Terra is a workhorse and it gets the job done. Overall, compared to a previous iteration of Regent (that was built entirely from the ground up in Python), it's been a good experience. Having first-class code generation capabilities has been really nice, especially with built-in support for things like parsing C header files, vectorization, and CUDA code generation. The language is stable and generally doesn't have many surprises. Unlike, say, C++ or Rust, there aren't as any corners to hide odd behaviors. (Obviously, there still is some room for such things, as you can see in the sibling comments. But I still think it's better than most languages.)
The main issue is, as siblings have noted, the size of the community. While most stuff works, if you find something broken you're likely going to have to fix it yourself. This is an area where we're always looking to grow.
[1]: http://regent-lang.org/
Please note: The entire "windows" portion of that article has largely been resolved at this point, because I fixed it myself. Some of the more egregious documentation problems have been fixed, but others remain unresolved.
Unfortunately, we have since discovered even more insane behavior: https://github.com/terralang/terra/issues/460
Thanks for pointing that issue out! I had a fun time figuring out the codegen algorithm by putting printf statements in every function I thought was relevant.
Why is that called non-euclidean?
I presume that's after the works of h. p. lovecraft, who created an association between non euclidean geometry and horrific nightmare realms and beings.
I used terra at least 6 years ago to create a JIT compiler for database queries.
The language itself is performant and pleasant, but there are not enough people using it, so troubleshooting is really painful.