FWIW we also store ASTs, not text. We offer many of the same benefits. Some day (soon?) I'll write up a full comparison between the two, because it seems a common ask.
Do you actually _like_ git? Or is it just good enough to get by?
Do you like having to git pull and git push and set up remotes and such? Or would something more integrated into your language and team and setup be nicer?
I think git is great, and better than many other options, but I don't think it's optimal. And it's not integrated with a larger system optimally.
Besides, while you do edit Darklang code in a text editor, it's not (WIP[1]) saved just in text files on disk. When you save, the code is automatically synced, available to you (and your team) immediately (with feature flagging and other tools to help make sure you don't "merge" incomplete/bad/broken stuff).
I absolutely understand the hesitancy, and concerns about vendor lock-in. We're doing our best to not lock users in, including working towards nice ways to "export" all of your dark stuff to another language/etc, using AI, if you so choose to bail.
[1] with minor extension, a text editor may work upon 'virtual' text files / workspaces, and when you save those, cool things happens. (yes, this is a bit hand-wavey, but we're just a few folks at this point and doing our best to make it less hand-wavey, soon :) )
Yeah -- I haven't found a super-simple way of hosting for free, on my domain, with browsers not complaining about it being served over http. Maybe that's me missing some big simple option, but Darklang-classic's setup for hosting a simple website on a personal domain was _nice_ and I'm looking forward to getting that again with -next.
Yeah -- my history is all with web dev. APIs, server- and client-side rendered HTML. Web-RTC. Http Clients. all that jazz. Your use definitely fits - in the meantime, before the site updates are done, I implore you to review the status update linked in the main post, watch the video embedded, and try out darklang-classic to get a feel. If you want a deeper peek in to our code (well, a snapshot from a bit over a year ago), the first few minutes of https://stachu.net/darklang-for-fsharp-devs might be useful.
<3. So often, I wish I could still talk to him, about anything, incl Dark.
I wish you the best in recovering from and processing your mother's passing - it's been over five years now since my dad's death. It's not easy, but it gets easier.
Maybe it's OK that software / the industry means less. Maybe death just puts things into perspective? At least, that feels like a component to me. Maybe I should have spent less time coding and more time calling him.
Hi there! Sorry, I've been busy. I only saw that someone posted this post to HN about an hour ago, and I've been scrambling a bit to catch up.
I'd say that Darklang-classic is ready enough for small projects, esp any web APIs. I've used it successfully for a good chunk of projects. That said, it's an imperfect solution, as outlined by the post on the main Darklang blog.
Darklang-next definitely isn't ready yet. I think I'll be porting the vast majority of _my_ code to Darklang by the end of the year, if not months earlier, but you know, software estimates. I'll do my best to keep in touch writing more posts with status updates.
maybe I'm wrong, but I think Tablecloth was developed as part of Darklang.
Our old editor was written in ReScript (or whatever names it had before) and OCaml. Tablecloth offered a 'common' lib for rescript and ocaml. Then when we ported the F# backend, we added an F# lib too. We killed our usage a few months ago, though
Darklang classic had version control built into the project. We'll build version control into the new version of Darklang as well. If you need something to reference, Unison's mechanism for version control is an inspiration.
Yeah I have no regret about pursuing AI + Dark. Personally, I think the title of the mentioned post was a bit much, and caught us some flack, but the intention and how it's panning out, I'm totally happy with.
I wouldn't say we're deliberately interested in losing some portion of our userbase. Rather, we wouldn't mind if folks pissed about that banner don't use Darklang. I stand by Paul's post and the banner being on the site.
appreciate the feedback here. as noted in some other comments, we spent all of 2023 on code, and only sprung up the new website at the end of the year. it needs a few iterations, and this feedback is useful. cheers.
By no git we definitely don't mean no version control.
The website, admittedly, needs a lot of work.
We spent all of 2023 forking the project and having our heads down coding. Only at the end of year did we resurface to create a new homepage and stuff. So, it's a bit thin, and needs revisions. Personally I've kinda been punting that until we rewrite the site in darklang, but clearly many people are not appreciating the content on the site, so maybe that punting was a bad choice.
Appreciate the other ideas too -- responding to a bunch of comments now but will circle back to read this comment and process it fully. Cheers.