Comment by andyferris
3 months ago
For semi-dynamic language, Julia definitely took the approach of being a dynamic language that can be (and is) JITed to excellent machine code. I personally have some larger projects that do a lot of staged programming and even runtime compilation of user-provided logic using Julia. Obviously the JIT is slower to complete than running a bit of Lua or whatever, but the speed after that is phenomenal and there’s no overhead when you run the same code a second time. It’s pretty great and I’d love to see more of that ability in other languages!
Some of the other points resonate with me. I think sensible dynamic scoping would be an easy way to do dependency injection. Together with something like linear types you could do capabilities pretty smoothly, I think. No real reason why you couldn’t experiment with some persistent storage as one of these dependencies, either. Together with a good JIT story would make for a good, modular environment.
Oh and Zig is another option for allowing injections that are checked when used at a call site rather than predefined through interfaces.
AFAIK it doesn’t have closures (it’s too C-like) so you need to use methods for all your (implicit) interfaces, but that’s okay…
I think the “exemplars” could be automatically yoinked from documentation and tests and existing usage of the function in the code base. Work needs to be done on the IDE front to make this accessible to the user.
Julia is kind of Dylan's revenge, even if it doesn't take over the whole world, it is already great if it gets its own corner, and from the looks of it that is going alright.