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Comment by noelwelsh

2 years ago

Because Moonbit is a modern language, while AssemblyScript is carrying forward the mistakes of the past. For example, Moonbit supports pattern matching and most language constructs are expressions. AS doesn't have pattern matching and consists primarily of statements. Moonbit has algebraic data types; it's not clear to me that AS does.

There might be other differences at runtime, but it's difficult to tell from just the website.

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noelwelsh

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andsoitis  2 years ago

> Because Moonbit is a modern language, while AssemblyScript is carrying forward the mistakes of the past.

No language has "no mistakes".

For instance, let's take a language like Scala, which appeared 20 years ago. Has it avoided mistakes of the past? Or lets take Rust, which appeared 8 years ago. Is it "perfect"? Same with Moonbit; it will make tradeoffs and mistakes and whatnot.

Mistakes are not always technical in nature either. They can be mistakes in positioning, strategy, community, governance, poor documentation, etc.

  • chefandy  2 years ago

    Modern doesn't imply perfect— just that it uses recent advancements.

    • coder543  2 years ago

      In most conversations, TypeScript generally seems to be considered a fairly "modern" language. TypeScript offers a variety of rather advanced type system features, and AssemblyScript is based on it, so by extension, AssemblyScript should be fairly "modern" too.

      Based on the limited docs that are available[0], Moonbit appears to be using C++-style "generics" that are just simple template substitutions (no constraints), which is far less "modern" than what TypeScript offers.

      Honestly, I don't think imprecise words like "modern" are particularly useful, helpful, or good for discussions like this. "Pattern matching" has been a feature of certain programming languages for decades, so is that truly a "modern" feature?

      [0]: https://moonbitlang.com/docs/syntax/#generics

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