Paul Biggar

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, not by

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. We'd love people who rely on

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 && and || operators. Darklang previously

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: via opam

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 Dark) We

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 written in the language, then compiling

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 technical debt hidden behind

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 contains all the work we've released

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 we can fix it when

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 for the last few

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 nearly done, and now it's time to start thinking about the future.

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 on Twitter, Leandro Ostera

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 absolutely, pathetically

rewrite Featured

Changes from the Dark rewrite

IF YOU USE DARK IN PRODUCTION, PLEASE READ THIS POST! We are approaching the end of the Dark backend rewrite (see previous updates: 1, 2, 3), which we are now tracking on GitHub. While there are still many tasks to be done, we're making progress and the end is in sight.

f# Featured

How's the Dark rewrite going?

A few months ago I started to rewrite the Dark backend in F#. I'm currently about 60% of the way through the rewrite. All of the major components have been partially transitioned, and it's a question of finishing everything out. I'll discuss below some of the interesting technical things that

Why Dark didn't choose Rust

Welcome again HN! Dark [https://darklang.com] is a programming language, structured editor, and infrastructure—all in one—whose goal is to make it 100x easier to build backend services. Check out the website [https://darklang.com/], our What is Dark [https://blog.darklang.com/what-is-dark/] post, and How Dark

Dark's new backend will be in F#

Welcome HN! Dark is a programming language, structured editor, and infrastructure—all in one—whose goal is to make it 100x easier to build backend services. Check out the website, our What is Dark post, and How Dark deploys in 50ms for more. Thanks for checking us out! Part of

Leaving OCaml

Part of a 3 part series. Followups on F#, Rust I built the first demo of Dark in Python, in about two weeks. A few months later when I started productizing it, I rebuilt it in OCaml. Back in 2017, when I was considering the language and platform to use