Comment by alpacaaa

I'm borrowing (pun intended) Rust syntax so that I can skip the parsing phase and focus on the interesting stuff, like type inference and code generation.

So even if it (currently) looks like Rust, it doesn't have any lifetimes nor borrow checking. It's just syntax, but I understand it can be confusing.

I could type an entire essay on "Why not Haskell". I've used it professionally for a few years and came to the conclusion that sticking to a tiny subset of the language (what I used to call Simple Haskell, I even wrote a book about it :D) is the only way to make it work in a large codebase in a team setting.

I've become weary of type astronauts and I don't want to use a language that allows or even promote certain (ab)use of type system features. In this sense, OCaml or even Elm are more inline with what I think is the sweet spot.

Borgo isn't too far off Ocaml to be fair if you squint a bit. Unfortunately OCaml suffers from years (decades?) of cruft that has accumulated over, to the point that even before you get started you have to pick an stdlib implementation. I know things are improving, but you get my point.

Ultimately I think that if a new language wants to be succesful and see some adoption, it has to integrate in an established ecosystem. See Typescript, but also Swift, Clojure, Scala and others.

I'd wish Borgo could do to Go what Typescript did to JS, bringing in additional type safety and modern features that people are starting to get used to from other less popular languages. Admittedly, TS is a bad comparison because of the madness you can encode at the type level, but the fact that it's been compatible with JS from day one is it's biggest selling point imo.