[johnnycerberus]

I think the JVM would also be a good choice once Loom lands. I've seen that right now the Java architects are trying to unify the ALGOL flavored Java with ML in the sense of algebraic data structures, pattern matching, local type inference. As you said, OCaml does not have a big community, library ecosystem. It also does not have the 100B$ garbage collectors of the JVM, which are a deal breaker, at least for me.

[Zababa]

That's a good option too, though in that case the tradeoff is that compiling to a single binary is a bit harder than in the other languages. Someone mentionned Scala too, which is even "higher level" than OCaml, but I think Scala has the issue of future/async (monadic) concurrency, and is even harder to compile to native. There are lots of options in that space, which is great!

> It also does not have the 100B$ garbage collectors of the JVM, which are a deal breaker, at least for me.

Can you expand a bit on that? I was under the impression that even with all that investment, Java code tends to be slower and more memory hungry than equivalent Go code.

[astrange]

No amount of $ spent on JITs and garbage collection can solve the problem that Java was designed with no respect for memory use. It just doesn’t have the features (such as but not limited to value types) that let you save memory.

They’re adding value types of course, but I haven’t looked at how exactly they’ll work.

[kaba0]

> Can you expand a bit on that? I was under the impression that even with all that investment, Java code tends to be slower and more memory hungry than equivalent Go code.

Go doesn’t need a good GC as much because it can rely on value types sometimes. But for general enough workloads a superior GC can triumph.

Also, Java is memory hungry only in that doing GC when it is not absolutely needed is useless work. The JVM is actually quite power efficient due to trading off memory for better throughput — so especially in server environments with huge (up to multi-TB) memory which the JVM is free to use, it can be ridiculously fast. So no, java is not slower than equivalent Go program though correctly comparing languages is nigh impossible.

[nextaccountic]

Does Java have sum types yet?

[Zababa]

It does, through sealed classes.