alt Hacker NewsI'd love to replace Python with something simple, expressive, and strongly typed that compiles to native code. I have a habit of building little CLI tools as conveniences for working with internal APIs, and you wouldn't think you could tell a performance difference between Go and Python for something like that, but you can. After a year or so of writing these tools in Go, I went back to Python because the LOC difference is stark, but every time I run one of them I wish it was written in Go.
(OCaml is probably what I'm looking for, but I'm having a hard time getting motivated to tackle it, because I dread dealing with the tooling and dependency management of a 20th century language from academia.)
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Yes, Go can hardly be called statically typed, when they use the empty interface everywhere.
Yes, OCaml would be a decent language to look into. Or perhaps even OxCaml. The folks over at Jane Street have put a lot of effort into tooling recently.
You can replace Python with Nim. It checks literally all your marks (expressive, fast, compiled, strong-typing). It's as concise as Python, and IMO, Nim syntax is even more flexible.
I bounced off OCaml a few years ago because of the state of the tooling, despite it being almost exactly the language I was looking for. I'm really happy with Gleam now, and recommended it over OCaml for most use cases.
Rust might be worth a look. It gets much closer to the line count and convenience of the dynamic languages like Python than Go, plus a somewhat better type system. Also gets a fully modern tooling and dependency management system. And native code of course.
I suppose you could try typescript which can compile to a single binary using node or bun. Both bun and node do type stripping of ts types, and can compile a cli to a single file executable. This is what anthropic does for Claude code.
You might want to try Dart. It is simple, has great tooling, and compiles to native code.
Disclaimer: I work on Flutter at Google.
Modern Java with Graalvm.
Have you tried Nim? Strong and static typed, versatile, compiles down to native code vía C, interops with C trivially, has macros and stuff to twist your brain if you're into that, and is trivially easy to get into.
https://nim-lang.org