Which server-side languages are you most excited about?

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Which server-side languages are you most interested in right now? Anything new or relatively new that’s caught your eye? Maybe an older language has made you all giddy?

Please share which server side languages or tech has got you excited right now! :smiley:

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  • Elixir, which I am working almost exclusively with for ~3.5 years now. The BEAM VM and OTP primitives are unmatched; I can’t find any other runtime that can transparently multiplex thousands of tasks over all available CPU cores without introducing huge lags or data races. There’s other bonuses that are too long to cover in such a short post.

  • Rust, because FP languages aren’t always fast and memory-efficient on the level of C++. Its ability to prevent you from introducing shared mutable state data races is absolutely priceless.

  • OCaml, because of its amazing typing system. Lack of multicore support, maybe the fact that it uses GC, and some imperative/mutability features are stuff I dislike but if it gets improved in the future I can see it easily beating languages all over the spectrum from C++ to LISP to Elixir to Java/C# even. It’s an extremely well thought-out language but ecosystem tooling could also use some work.

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I’ve used the BEAM (elixir and prior erlang) for about 20 years now so it’s not really new/exciting anymore, but it’s a rock solid goto. :slight_smile:

Currently what I’m excited about is Rust for so many various things though and for so many various reason! It’s actually replacing C++ for me, which is utterly astounding!

You can try the multicore version of it “today”. ^.^

For note, each version of ocaml is importing more of the multicore lab as they can solidly test each part of it and migrate in a backwards compatible way, so it will be coming to ‘stable’ eventually. :slight_smile:

It’s ecosystem tooling has made tremendous strides in the past 5 years, from opam to dune. :slight_smile:

However, think of Rust as an OCaml (Rust was originally written in OCaml) with a worse syntax, runs even faster, and no GC. ^.^

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Gotta admit, I am not at all interested in being an early adopter and tester.

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Early adopter in that it was made like 5 years ago? Lol.

But yeah, it’s the Project to get it working in OCaml, (OCaml Labs! There’s a few things like that) but it can break backwards compat, hence why ocaml core piecemeals it into stable. :slight_smile:

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Early adopter in the sense of it not being fully ready and not supporting latest OCaml. Multicore is at what, 4.02?

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Yeah the Multicore Lab started when OCaml was 4.02 so that’s the version it’s locked at sadly. ^.^;

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While I am working mostly with Elixir currently (as well as doing some maintenance of Ruby/Rails projects…) I am most excited about considering the possibilities of using Haskell as server-side language, where the higher-order (and in some cases dependent) type system is able to perform a huge amount of checking at compile time.

And on the other hand, I hope to build a WebApp that uses Prolog under the hood sometime. Mostly because I think it would be very interesting and I’ll definitely learn a lot along the way.

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Gleam! :grin:

Rust is loads of fun too, would love to do more of that professionally.

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Besides Elixir and Go, I’m most excited about Rust and Deno (runtime, an alternative to Node by Ryan Dhal).

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