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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

Dark v2 Roadmap

Dark v2 Roadmap

tl;dr there's a Dark v2 roadmap [https://roadmap.darklang.com/] now. There are a number of things missing for Dark to be able to have product market fit: * Dark lacks SDKs for 3rd party APIs * Dark lacks a good user account/authentication story While these are the

FizzBoom benchmark (call for participation)

benchmarks Featured

FizzBoom benchmark (call for participation)

I've been working recently on a benchmark, to try and see how to get the most performance from the Dark backend. I've reimplemented [https://github.com/darklang/fizzboom] the core of Dark in various languages and web frameworks, notably in OCaml, F# and Rust. As a

Adventures in Async

Architecture Featured

Adventures in Async

I was very recently the holder of three opinions: * Rust is magic fairy dust that can fix all my problems * Async is magic fairy dust that can fix all my problems * GraphQL is magic fairy dust that can fix all my problems Unsurprisingly, all of these appear to be wrong.

How to add a new feature to Dark

How to add a new feature to Dark

On Saturday, we had our third contributor meetup, this one was organized by Shahriyar Nasir [https://twitter.com/ShahriyarNasir] (thanks Shah!). This time, we did mob coding to add a Tuple type to Dark, and we recorded the whole thing. A tuple looks like this: let x = (somevar, "a

First thoughts on Rust vs OCaml

First thoughts on Rust vs OCaml

I'm about two weeks into Rust now, so this feels like a good time to write a critique, before I get Stockholm Syndrome'd. My main motivation in learning Rust is that I have to maintain some of Dark's Rust code [https://docs.darklang.com/

Directions and roadmaps

Directions and roadmaps

There was a wonderful post just now that I saw on HN as I was procrastinating writing this post. It was by Tim Bray [https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/08/09/Service-Fabric-News], and it covered my favorite topic, which is just how batshit cloud services have gotten,

First Dark contributor meetup

First Dark contributor meetup

On Friday we had our first contributor meetup. Thirteen folks showed up to a zoom call to discuss how to contribute to Dark. Obviously, the point of the conversation was to get to know each other. We're all hanging out in the #contributors [https://darklang.com/slack-invite] channel,

Dark devlog #3: onboarding

Dark devlog #3: onboarding

An annoying thing about coding is that some days you're on fire, producing masterpieces, knocking down obstacle after obstacle. And some weeks, you're trapped figuring out bugs that ultimately come down to having a semi-colon out of place. Most of the time for me, the difference

Dark devlog #2: what next?

Dark devlog #2: what next?

After spending the last week on some extremely urgent things on my plate (helping the team get jobs, moving, infra stability, costs, and legal and transition work), I have time to get back to the product. There's still not a clear sense of what to work on next.

Dark devlog #1: fresh start

Dark devlog #1: fresh start

So right now Dark is made up of 100,000 lines of code, a hosted service with 6000 users, a 1600 member Slack community, 39 people who have contributed or intend to contribute to our repo, and 500ish "real" projects. And—as of recently—just me to build

Dark and the long term

TL;DR: We’re taking a longer term approach to building Dark. As part of this, we’ve made the difficult decision to shrink Dark’s team, and to change how we build both the product and the company. Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking hard about

Shortcutting a standard library

Backend Development

Shortcutting a standard library

Coauthored by Julian Ceipek [https://jceipek.com/] We recently decided to significantly expand Dark [https://darklang.com/]’s standard library. While our standard library has a lot of functionality for the Dark “framework”, including HTTP, worker/queue, and datastore functions [https://medium.com/darklang/compiling-dark-to-sql-bb8918d1acdd], we were a little short

Spin up a Slack app in seconds with Dark

Software Development

Spin up a Slack app in seconds with Dark

Seconds is a bit of an exaggeration, but we’ve made it possible to build a full Slack app in less than an hour. You can jump right in [https://darklang.com/signup?05b46f1e-153b-4f6f-9926-b50060a994f3] (limited number of accounts available — if the link has expired, click here [https://darklang.com/beta]

Compiling Dark to SQL

Compiling Dark to SQL

How do we make programs in Dark fast, while keeping complexity for developers really low? We recently shipped a new Dark feature that compiles Dark code to SQL. This post goes into the nitty gritty details of how and why we built it. First, let’s see it in action:

Building an Office Sign-In in Dark

We’ve just released a demo video of Dark [https://darklang.com/]. The demo is building out an office sign in application. You choose who you’re visiting (a host) and sign in with your name. I highly recommend watching the video instead of reading this. But… since the video

Developer Tools

Unveiling Dark

Today we’re unveiling Dark and moving into private beta. Backends today are too complicated to build. Dark is designed to massively reduce that complexity. Dark is a holistic programming language, editor, and infrastructure for building backends. You write in the Dark language, using the Dark editor, and your program

Dark Announces $3.5M in Seed Financing

Today we’re announcing that Dark has raised $3.5M in seed funding. We actually raised our funding back in 2017, and have been quietly building Dark for the last two years. Our team has developed a holistic programming language, editor, and infrastructure. You write in the Dark language, using

Continuous Delivery Featured

How Dark deploys code in 50ms

Speed of developer iteration is the single most important factor in how quickly a technology company can move. Unfortunately, modern applications work against us: our systems are required to be live updated, silently and without downtime or maintenance windows. Deploying into these live systems is tough, requiring complex Continuous Delivery

Real problems with functional languages

And their influence on Dark After two decades of coding professionally in a dozen languages, I’ve come to a conclusion about static and dynamic types: * Static types help you ensure that your changes work, especially for changes that span large parts of the program. This leads to long-term productivity

Dark Residency

We’re opening up for a couple more alpha users in our residency (so far, we’ve had two people build their business on it through a similar program, see below¹). Dark lets you write a backend really easily, and your infrastructure is set up as soon as you write

Tablecloth: a new standard library for OCaml & ReasonML

Tablecloth: a new standard library for OCaml & ReasonML

Tablecloth [https://github.com/darklang/tablecloth] is an ergonomic, cross-platform, standard library for use with OCaml and ReasonML, which provides easy-to-use, comprehensive and performant modules, that have the same API on all OCaml / ReasonML / Bucklescript platforms. Tablecloth is not intended to replace your current standard library. Instead, it’s intended

What is Dark?

Dark is a holistic programming language, structured editor, and infrastructure, for building backend web services. It’s aimed at frontend, backend, and mobile engineers. Our goal is to make coding 100x easier, which we believe will allow a billion people to build software. This is a huge challenge, that requires