[bitcrshr]

love the syntax, and excited to mess with it, but man i’m sad to see it’s on the JVM. if i had to guess, a lot of langs like this are on JVM because that’s a lot simpler than writing a whole backend with anywhere near the same performance or reliability, and i totally get that.

that being said, bearing in mind that i’m not a Java/JVM developer and only rarely have to use it, for the few nontrivial projects i have shipped with it the build system was by far the most challenging and frustrating. it’s so complex and has such a large surface area.

no hate at all, and the trade offs are completely reasonable, but i am hoping during my career we’ll start seeing either a massive simplification of JVM builds or a lot of innovation that would make native compilers easier to build.

(as a side note, it is nice to have langs like this for when JVM is the only option)

[lucyjojo]

there's no such thing as generic "jvm builds" as far as i understand though. jvm is the target, it's like saying x64 builds are complex. maybe you re thinking of ant or maven or gradle? there are plenty others.

you can build basic java with "javac myfile.java". done.

each jvm language has its own build tools and some build tools cover jvm languages in between others.

[bitcrshr]

i think you’re right, though i think i was thinking about about this at a higher level. i more meant that the languages in the JVM ecosystem I have experience with (java, kotlin, and scala) have all given me similar unpleasant experiences building them. same tools too, though you probably wouldn’t use sbt for non-scala projects even though you could.

the main pain points for me are dependencies, packaging, and configuration. best i can tell, those pains are shared between anything that targets JVM, especially those that want to have good interop.