alt Hacker NewsI've chatted a bit with the author, but not actually tried the language. It looks very interesting, and a clear improvement. I'm not particularly quiet about not liking Go[1].
I do think there may be a limit to how far it can be improved, though. Like typed nil means that a variable of an interface type (say coming from pure Go code) should enter Lisette as Option<Option<http.Handler>>. Sure, one can match on Some(Some(h)) to not require two unwrapping steps, but it becomes a bit awkward anyway. (note: this double-Option is not a thing in Lisette at least as of now)
Lisette also doesn't remove the need to call defer (as opposed to RAII) in the very awkward way Go does. E.g. de facto requiring that you double-close on any file opened for write.
Typescript helps write javascript, but that's because until WASM there was no other language option to actually run in the browser. So even typescript would be a harder sell now that WASM can do it. Basically, why try to make Go more like Rust when Rust is right there? And fair enough, the author may be aiming for somewhere in between. And then there's the issue of existing codebases; not everything is greenfield.
So this seems best suited for existing Go codebases, or when one (for some reason) wants to use the Go runtime (which sure, it's at least nicer than the Java runtime), but with a better language. And it does look like a better language.
So I guess what's not obvious to me (and I mentioned this to the author) is what's the quick start guide to having the next file be in Lisette and not Go. I don't think this is a flaw, but just a matter of filling in some blanks.
[1] https://blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go-is-still-not-good.html
Replies
From your blog entry:
> Go was not satisfied with one billion dollar mistake, so they decided to have two flavors of NULL
Thanks for raising this kind of things in such a comprehensible way.
Now what I don't understand is that TypeScript, even if it was something to make JavaScript more bearable, didn't fix this! TS is even worse in this regard. And yet no one seems to care in the NodeJS ecosystem.
<selfPromotion>That's why I created my own Option type package in NPM in case it's useful for anyone: https://www.npmjs.com/package/fp-sdk </selfPromotion>
> Basically, why try to make Go more like Rust when Rust is right there?
Go gives you access to a compute- and memory-efficient concurrent GC that has few or no equivalents elsewhere. It's a great platform for problem domains where GC is truly essential (fiddling with spaghetti-like reference graphs), even though you're giving up the enormous C-FFI ecosystem (unless you use Cgo, which is not really Go in a sense) due to the incompatibilities introduced by Go's weird user-mode stackful fibers approach.
Rust's async story is much less ergonomic than go's -- mostly because of lack of garbage collection. That might be a good reason by itself?
> Basically, why try to make Go more like Rust when Rust is right there?
The avg developer moves a lot faster in a GC language. I recently tried making a chatbot in both Rust and Python, and even with some experience in Rust I was much faster in Python.
Go is also great for making quick lil CLI things like this https://github.com/sa-/wordle-tui