Featured

First Steps of Darklang Inc.

Darklang Inc is the new steward of the Darklang language, whose team has been working on Darklang for several years. In this post, we'll cover three big changes related to Darklang: we've formed a new company, we're open-sourcing everything, and we're going

Goodbye Dark Inc. - Hello Darklang Inc.

Dark Inc has officially run out of money. Dark Inc is the company we founded in 2017 to build Darklang, a statically-typed functional programming language built to strip all of the bullshit from backend coding. To ensure continuity for users and fans, as well as to continue building what we

Darklang Goes Open Source

As part of shutting down Dark Inc. and forming Darklang Inc., we've finally open-sourced all of our repositories. Our source code is now under the Apache License 2.0. For years, we wrestled with questions of sustainability and how to build something that truly empowers developers. We'

Winding Down Darklang-Classic

Darklang-Classic has been running in production since 2019, first in a private beta for a few users/orgs, and eventually a public beta since then. Back when it was first deployed, the company supporting the product was in a fast-expansion ok-to-spend-VC-money phase, with vendors giving discounts to the org. Those

Featured

An overdue status update on Darklang

We've been working hard at Darklang for the past year, but haven't been very vocal about what we've been up to. Here’s the “Darklang” that’s been live for years: Darklang – the live version, which we're now calling Darklang classic – is

Darklang is going all-in on AI

Like an aging rock star making a final stab at glory, I'm delighted to announce that Darklang is going all in on AI/GPT. As everyone knows, the folks over at OpenAI produced a magic box that writes code. And it even produces quite good code – not perfect,

Sponsoring Darklang

We'd love you to sponsor Darklang's development! Long term, we'd like Darklang to be sustainable from the community. In the future, we expect paid accounts will support our development and maintenance. Until then, you can help build Darklang by sponsoring us via GitHub Sponsors.

Featured

Darklang Release 9

Darklang Release 9 contains all the changes from December 2022. You can read more about the changes listed below in the Changelog, and check out our discussion and next month's planning on Youtube. Short-circuiting boolean functions: && and || The big win for users is the new short-circuiting

Darklang Releases 7 and 8

tl;dr Release notes [7] [8] and release discussion Darklang Release 7 contains all the changes from October 2022, and Release 8 contains all the changes from November 2022. Writing these changelogs takes a bit of time, so we’re a month late, sorry! We’ve recently written a REPL

Announcing Rescript-tea

Rescript-tea is a Rescript implementation of The Elm Architecture, an MVU (Model-View-Update) pattern for organizing frontend applications and components. Darklang was one of the largest users of bucklescript-tea, the precursor to rescript-tea, and our entire client is built around it. Rescript has changed a lot since bucklescript-tea was written, and

Darklang Release 6

Darklang release 6 contains all the changes from September 2022. Finally, we have support for negative numbers! To try them out, well, just like type the minus sign I guess. We also now show why deprecated functions are deprecated, do better expression conversion during backspacing, and many many small improvements

New version of Tablecloth

We've released version 0.0.8 of Tablecloth, an ergonomic, cross-platform standard library to allow you share code between OCaml and Rescript. This version has dozens of new functions, which you can see in the Changelog. You can install it: * in Rescript: via npm as tablecloth-rescript * in OCaml:

Darklang release 5

Darklang release 5 contains all the changes from August 2022. This included two major changes: * experimental support for Tuples (that is, fixed length lists of elements of different types, for example (1,"string",false) * contributor settings page (including toggles for experimental features and features useful when contributing to

Building Dark in Dark

For years, we've talked about building Dark in Dark. In fact, one of the most common questions we've had about Dark is why isn't it built in Dark? When you are talking about building a language in itself, typically it means a compiler being

Darklang release 4

Darklang Release 4 contains the changes from July 2022. Most of the changes this month were behind the scenes, aiming at releasing new type system, language, and editor features over the next few months. Nevertheless, we have a couple of nice features for you in this release including: * Dozens of

Darklang Release 3

(Now that the big bad rewrite is done, we've moved Darklang to monthly releases). Darklang Release 3 contains the changes from June 2022, and has a lot of small wins enabled by the rewrite. It's also the start of us clearing out a lot of the

Darklang Release 2

I'm pleased to announce Darklang Release 2. Release 2 is the first of a new versioning scheme we announced recently. We're doing a "Release" every month, which is just a set of release notes discussing what we shipped over the last month. Release 2

I'm as shocked as you, but the Darklang backend rewrite is actually complete

For the first few years of the life of Darklang, each time we didn't have a library available for our OCaml-based backend, or decided to build a feature in our DB instead of on a proper cloud server, we said "ugh, let's hack this and

Darklang release schedule

I remember when I started at Mozilla, and I first got fully sold on continuous delivery. Mozilla had just released Firefox 4, a long and grueling change where some important CSS features had been ready but unshipped for over 18 months before Firefox 4 actually got out the door, slowing

Try out the new Darklang backend

We're completing our migration to the new backend, which we've previously discussed a [https://blog.darklang.com/darklang-year-in-review-2021/] few [https://blog.darklang.com/hows-the-dark-rewrite-going/] times. Progress is going well, and all https://darklang.com requests (including all editor usage) have been served by the new backend

Darklang year in review - 2021

We just slipped into March, so this is as good a time as any to review what happened in Darklang in 2021. While the bulk of this post is technical details about the rewrite, I have included some company details at the bottom too. Enjoy! For context, Darklang is an

Darklang Community Meetup

It's 2022, and we're restarting Darklang community meetups! Update: here's the video Original post We've spent all of 2021 [https://github.com/darklang/dark/pulls?q=is%3Apr+closed%3A%3C2022-01-01] doing a rewrite of Darklang's backend. We're

Backend Featured

Benchmarking F#6 Tasks

A lot of new performance-related stuff landed in the F# world recently. As well as the release of .NET 6, F# 6 was recently released, with built-in, highly-optimized "Resumable Code" Tasks. So let's measure it.

How to fund CaramelLang?

and should it be open source? I'm taking a break from reporting on the progress of Darklang [https://darklang.com] (it's slow but steady [https://github.com/darklang/dark/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed]) to write up some thoughts on an interesting question. This weekend

Optimizing Tasks in F#

I recently went through an optimization exercise. As part of Darklang's rewrite in F#, I needed to make sure that my new code was as fast as the old code - or at least, not horrendously slow. A quick load test revealed the worst: the new code was