None of the industrial languages I’ve looked at (Kotlin, Typescript, Go, Java, Swift, Rust) can do the things I want to do using only typelevel features, especially at practical scale. Eg, transform a schema type that describes my database tables into an easy-to-use query builder and data abstraction API with rich method chaining.
Often in Java/Kotlin projects people end up writing compiler plugins / annotation processors which is like moving the codegen to build time and making it harder to inspect/understand, while simultaneously spending more developer time on it since those systems may need to run for every compiler invocation. The same goes for Rust; rust’s various macro systems target the problem I have, but Rust users report long compile times due to macro magic. More esoteric languages like Scala and Haskell might have the expressive power I want, but don’t seem practical to implement for other reasons.
Of course there’s always the runtime only approach in Ruby/ActiveRecord but that runs into correctness problems at practical scales.
Codegen is usually brittle and is often ugly, but is guaranteed to have more metaprogramming power than in-language typelevel features. Ultimately any such system can be complex, I just hope to build one where the leverage I payed for with complexity is well worth it.
Often in Java/Kotlin projects people end up writing compiler plugins / annotation processors which is like moving the codegen to build time and making it harder to inspect/understand, while simultaneously spending more developer time on it since those systems may need to run for every compiler invocation. The same goes for Rust; rust’s various macro systems target the problem I have, but Rust users report long compile times due to macro magic. More esoteric languages like Scala and Haskell might have the expressive power I want, but don’t seem practical to implement for other reasons.
Of course there’s always the runtime only approach in Ruby/ActiveRecord but that runs into correctness problems at practical scales.
Codegen is usually brittle and is often ugly, but is guaranteed to have more metaprogramming power than in-language typelevel features. Ultimately any such system can be complex, I just hope to build one where the leverage I payed for with complexity is well worth it.