alt Hacker NewsI like the looks of this, and the idea behind it, but TypeScriot via Deno is an audited language with a good security model, a good type system, and sandboxing in an extremely well-hardened runtime. It's also a language that LLMs are exceptionally well-trained on. What does Mog offer that's meaningfully superior in an agent context?
I see that Deno requires a subprocess which introduces some overhead, and I might be naive to think so, but that doesn't seem like it would matter much when agent round-trip and inference time is way, way longer than any inefficiency a subprocess would introduce. (edit: I realized in some cases the round-trip time may be negligible if the agent is local, but inference is still very slow)
I admittedly do prefer the syntax here, but I'm more so asking these questions from a point of pragmatism over idealism. I already use Deno because it's convenient, practical, and efficient rather than ideal.
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It's a legitimate question to ask about any new language post AI - given there is no training dataset, any other language would work better with AI.
The bigger problem is maintainability over the long term, Deno is built by Node.js creator and is maintained for half a decade now, that's hard to compete with. In a way it's much more about social trust rather than particular syntax.
I cannot comment on the new language, but Typescript is a huge spec. Yes, it has guardrails, but there is a lot of complexity to handle.
Something purpose built to enable embedding allows it to be used in more contexts. Maybe I want a Mog plugin for my latest video game. Embedding JS is possible, but no fun.
One thing that comes to mind, more of a first reaction than a considered opinion, is the complexity of V8 getting in the way. JavaScript and Typescript present a challenge to language implementors.
There is something to be said about giving AIs a clean foundation on which to build their own language. This allows evolution of such systems to go all the way into the compiler, beyond tooling.
I agree with this take. What does this bring to the table that can't be done with pretty much any preexisting toolset? Hell, even bash and chroot jail...
I generally agree. TypeScript is a great language, and JS runtimes have certainly had a lot of money and effort poured into them for a long time. I would add WASM to this category, as probably the closest thing to Mog. Write a program in some language, compile it to WASM, and load it into the host process. This is (probably) nice and safe, and relatively performant.
Since it's new, Mog will likely not yet beat existing systems at basically anything. Its potential lies in having better performance and a much smaller total system footprint and complexity than the alternatives. WASM is generally interpreted -- you can compile it, but it wasn't really designed for that as far as I know.
More generally, I think new execution environments are good opportunities for new languages that directly address the needs of that environment. The example that comes to mind is JavaScript, which turned webpages into dynamically loaded applications. AI agents have such heavy usage and specific problems that a language designed to be both written and executed by them is worth a shot in my opinion.