alt Hacker NewsDarklang Goes Open Source
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I’ve watched the demo video, and gone through the discussion here but I’m still not sure what the core use case for Darklang is. It feels like I'm missing something obvious.
Can someone explain the practical problems this is solving better than existing tools like Python or other backend stacks?
Also, genuine question: how was the team able to work on this for 2+ years without revenue or traction? Was there still funding left, or was this a side project during that time?
congrats Paul for landing the plane. i respect your dedication to the cause you see more pressing and have burned bridges for and hope T4P contributes toward the permanent peace we all want.
I guess darklang was too far ahead in their thinking in some areas and choose the wrong path for other. I really liked the deployless idea, but would have loved in even more on-premise. No way to get the data to stay in Europe.
Making hard connections between the editor and the lang was interesting also. Seems like they have moved away from that.
Hope there is a easy way to set it up locally, i was really intrigued when they first launched
Was previously "source available" but is now Apache 2. Good choice IMHO!
Also looks like it required their cloud setup to run, you previously couldn't run it locally. Now you can, so I think it's moving in the right direction!
Epic's new language, Verse, is also well poised for the "immutable" future of AI agent coding. Verse uses an effects system, and the <transacts> effect is required for any function to change a mutable variable. These changes are transactional, so if you have a failure in your <transacts> function, any changes it made are rolled back at exit. Code still looks imperative-ish, but it's both safe and pure.
(Or, it works something like this. The documentation is hard to understand; I'm working mostly on memory from their keynote)
> We're now building Darklang to run locally as a CLI
Dark's structure editor looked promising. I'm really disappointed that the project moved away from this because a hosted visual programming environment felt like the whole value proposition in the first place.
Was it the pivot to AI that killed this, was it issues with the design of the language or was the structure editor just not as useful as it seemed?
I've been following Dark since its inception and found the idea inspiring. I'm happy about today's announcements and look forward to seeing what comes next.
On a personal note, I'm curious around the move to F# as the implementing language and wonder if there will be ports to other languages now that it's open source.
In theory, Dark and associated infrastructure for running Dark apps is the perfect companion to LLM based vibe coding… I think, and I am just understanding this now. The goals of Darklang were always “no this, no that, not that either.” And so the focus was not on targeting 3rd party stuff of questionable design, but rather a single integrated set of patterns that abstracted the messy bits away.
Turns out, the messy bits are the things that turn your vibe coded Twitter clone into a full time operations job…
Been following from the sidelines for years. Wish Paul and team invest in a person good at docs, some web design and copy writing. The website, docs, visuals, examples, typography, are just very confusing and feel amateurish.
Not blaming. Not everyone is good at everything or wants to make time for it.
But a good, well structured landing page with great, real life, examples and good hierarchy backed by awesome docs will make a ton of difference adoption wise. I hope.
Because the title at the top links to the blog (not the homepage) I was a bit puzzled as to what Darklang actually _is_. One more click on a similar logo reveals "Darklang puts everything in one box, so you can build CLIs and cloud apps with no bullshit, just code."
What are the pros and cons of Dark Lang vs Unison?
Am I the only one that thinks this is nonsense? Can someone please explain why I would want this over python or others?
Congrats on Dark for making it this far!
Relevent timeline:
https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financ... (2019)
https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ (2020 - in which the team is fired to extend runway I guess to today)
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."
So where do we go from here? Right now, the team is just me. I am committed to realizing the full vision of what Dark should be. Dark is financially healthy for many years, and there is time to think and to plan. I plan to involve the community much more in Dark’s growth, and slowly rebuild the team at a pace appropriate to the product’s maturity, focusing on a small, tight team that can wear many hats.
Start of a new rewrite: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ (2020)
Two years later: https://blog.darklang.com/backend-rewrite-complete/ (2022)
seemingly a new pivot to "all in" on AI?: https://blog.darklang.com/gpt/ (2023)
No news, one year later https://blog.darklang.com/an-overdue-status-update/ (2024)
Would be interesting to the Dark team to revisit this post, which is a look at PL funding models:
https://blog.darklang.com/how-to-fund-caramel/
Building programming languages is hard especially when you're not backed by a company. I think Eve (I worked on that one) and Dark were the two major VC funded languages, and at this point I don't think that's a good model for funding this kind of thing. You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled directly in to SF landords pockets. Something more like the Mojo people have gotten is what it takes (they've raised upwards of 100 million).
Anyway I can't wait to see where Dark goes in the future, and what their funding model will be going forward.
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What an interesting project - once this rolls out, absolutely want to try it. There is something delightful about the fundamental idea of a "canvas" as the code editor.
https://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-darklang-... includes this, which is a really interesting pattern that I don't remember hearing about before for this kind of company:
> In conversation with our investors and the board, we believed that the best way forward was to shut down the company, as it was clear that an 8 year old product with no traction was not going to attract new investment. In our discussions, we agreed that continuity of the product was in the best interest of the users and the community (and of both founders and investors, who do not enjoy being blamed for shutting down tools they can no longer afford to run), and we agreed that this could best be achieved by selling it to the employees.
Any other examples of that? I'm particularly interested in that for this kind of software product.