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The pitch on their home page is "puts academic language features to work". But one of those academic languages, Haskell, has a GHC-based compiler to Webassembl
by rst 5y ago
The pitch on their home page is "puts academic language features to work". But one of those academic languages, Haskell, has a GHC-based compiler to Webassembly (asterius), and it's not clear why someone would prefer Grain if "academic language features" are what they want.
There are a bunch of languages that compile to webassembly, including Rust, Golang, Python (via Pyodide), and Kotlin, so that by itself isn't a great competitive differentiator either.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago> There are a bunch of languages that compile to webassembly, including Rust, Golang, Python (via Pyodide), and Kotlin, so that by itself isn't a great competitive differentiator either. If you've ever tried actually doing something with webassemly, you know that none of these actually work that well and should be considered pre-alpha software. (And often abandoned or unsupported.) Realistically at this point your only choice for webassembly is emscripten, but the code quality and documentation quality of that project is abysmal. Grain makes sense from that point of view; something that compiles to webassembly and isn't a giant pile of unvetted legacy hacks doesn't exist right now.