Moonbit: Fast, compact and user friendly language for WebAssembly

Hi, I am the lead of this project, you can try it now with our online IDE, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;try.moonbitlang.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;try.moonbitlang.com</a> (F5 to run)<p>The docs are available <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;moonbit-docs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;moonbit-docs</a>, the compiler would be publicly available when we reach the beta status (expected to be the end of Q2 in 2024).<p>Feel free to ask me any question

The site compares it to Rust and Go but to me the comparison is AssemblyScript. It’s also WASM-native and new with relatively little ecosystem around it. But compared to Moonbit it’s a familiar language to anyone that’s used TypeScript. So why use Moonbit over AssemblyScript?

Having `func` keyword for a top function definition, but `fn` keyword for a nested function definition is evil. It should be either `func` or `fn` independently of a particular context.

I&#x27;m excited to see a modern GCed language that is targetting WASM. Closest comparison is probably Grain (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grain-lang.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grain-lang.org&#x2F;</a>).

&quot;The development of an entire language toolchain, previously spanning years or even a decade, has been streamlined through our accrued experience and the establishment of a dedicated talented team from Moonbit&#x27;s inception. We expect Moonbit to reach beta status by the end of Q2 of 2024, indicating a phase of relative stability, minimal bugs, and a robust Foreign Function Interface (FFI) for interactions with the Wasm host. We will make the source code publicly available once we reach beta quality. Our strategic plans involve Wasm GC integration for Wasm 2.0 and our homebrewed GC for Wasm 1.0, in line with Wasm proposals.&quot;<p>so <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;</a> is empty for now

I see from comments here that Moonbit has a GC. However, the resulting binary for Fibonacci is 253 bytes, which presumably does not include a GC. Is that using the proposed WASM-native GC, or is the build system smart enough to omit the GC since it’s not needed here?

This makes me think about Grain [0] - another Wasm-first programming language. This could be nice to add Grain to the comparison.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grain-lang.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grain-lang.org&#x2F;</a>

About Team links to a edu.cn page in Chinese. It seems a university project but I can&#x27;t confirm. The Join Us page is another Chinese one. The examples on the home page seem to require JavaScript from baidu.com.

That’s not how you’d implement fibonacci in Go

Is this project associated with Meta? The creator Hongbo Zhang worked at Meta on some of their open source programming language projects (ReasonML and Flow). According to LinkedIn, he&#x27;s still employed there.

Who funds the development? Will there be paid features?

No license.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;moonbit-docs&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;moonbit-docs&#x2F;</a>

Interesting how this is written like a corporate press release.

What is your long term plan?<p>Do you intend to support this language indefinitely?

in an era where there are too many choices for writing things, if you don&#x27;t show how your language is different and&#x2F;or better compared to other languages which almost definitely more popular, then you&#x27;ll lost before you start. I mean, show some example and I&#x27;ll decide if it&#x27;s worth to try. for this language? sorry, I&#x27;m not sold in the slightest.

Well. I am very excited by this. We&#x27;ve built our front end in F# with Fable and our backend&#x2F;engine is in Rust which compiles to WASM.<p>The WASM story came second, and it&#x27;d be really cool to eventually lean into something like this, particularly given the much faster compilation time.<p>Have followed your work on Rescript, and excited to see that this is where you&#x27;ve taken things.

I like it a lot tbh b&#x2F;c it looks a lot like Go.<p>Unfortunately Go is unusuable as wasm target for browsers due its huge binary. The browser needs a lot of time to download and parse it. Not to mention it starts to crash if your app is large enough(i.e a complete SPA in Go only).

Looks quite nice, but you should add a banner to the load screen for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;try.moonbitlang.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;try.moonbitlang.com</a> that it will take quite a while to load and the page is not broken.

Suggestion. Rename from `func` to `fn` so it&#x27;s more aligned with Rust.

I’ve been considering trying my hand at a C-like WASM language, with most features mapping directly to WASM instructions. Surprised no one’s done something like that yet. Very cool tech

Looking forward to a &quot;container-free Cloud IDE with offline capabilities, accessible from any location with a browser&quot;.

The module-level init seems like a great idea. I have been pondering how to get something like this right.

how do you intend to handle nulls? allow nulls, nullable types or Option&#x2F;Maybe type?

There are now more programming languages coming out than JD frameworks! Hard to keep up

Can i SSR a WASM module ?

I tried clicking through to find some syntax and got to this page[0] which seems to show things but the text is illegible on a dark background (something to do with picking up a dark mode setting on my device maybe?)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;moonbitlang.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;syntax&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;moonbitlang.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;syntax&#x2F;</a>

So why bother with this, when compared against AssemblyScript and Grain, both more mature and existing communities?

Do you really avoid pointers by making everything a pointer?

Absolutely nothing about memory management?