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That's a very interesting thought and it seems to answer the question in the title (which the linked article doesn't). In theory though there are certain busin
by mojuba 5y ago
That's a very interesting thought and it seems to answer the question in the title (which the linked article doesn't).
In theory though there are certain business opportunities in this space that haven't been explored yet, it seems.
For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction. Personally I would pay for a Swift compiler that doesn't take seconds to compile a single long-ish expression with floating point arithmetic, or doesn't take tens of minutes to fully build a project that isn't even that big. Similarly I'd pay for a replacement for Xcode that doesn't have bugs in every single feature it implements. As an iOS developer I'm honestly very tired of and fed up with both Swift's slowness and Xcode's bugginess. There has to be some competition here too, already.
In other words, competition is what the PL industry is lacking, I think. But not among the languages themselves as much as among the compilers (and possibly the rest of the tooling and environments).
I don't know how we ended up in a world where there's only one compiler per each newly created language. I'm not sure this is normal or it's the way it should be.
- sanxiyn 5y ago> For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction. I used to think this, but now I am skeptical, because of zapcc. zapcc was almost exactly this: a faster compiler for C++, first propreitary, now open source because it failed. Still no traction.
- jamil7 5y ago> that doesn't take seconds to compile a single long-ish expression with floating point arithmetic Or some complex Combine chains just hang forever and not compile at all with no indication what the problem is. Yet they keep adding language features that clearly the compiler can't deal with.
- native_samples 5y agoCheck out AppCode by JetBrains. It's an Xcode competitor.
- munificent 5y ago> For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction. This is a viable business model in principle but seems to rarely work in practice. A big part of the problem is that all languages in wide use already have mature compilers and the language itself is evolving as quickly as its designers able to make it. This means that anyone entering the third-party compiler business has to not only catch up to the existing mature implementation (and be fully bug-for-bug compatible with it), they have to surpass that and track a quickly moving target. So far, few have been able to pull that off successfully.