On 21 December 2012 08:13, Andreas Hartmann <
andreas....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm currently evaluating options for making client-side development more
> efficient and fun while producing code that is easy to understand and to
> maintain. Roy is very promising. But before making serious investments in
> establishing a Roy infrastructure at our company and encouraging my fellow
> developers to spend their time familiarizing with it, I'd like to get a
> better feeling whether Roy has the potential of becoming a production-ready
> language in the mid-term future.
Depends on your definition of mid-term. I'm hoping to have Roy version
1.0 out early next year (hopefully by end of March).
> On [1], Brian describes the language as experimental. Does that imply any
> fundamental conceptual limitations?
I mean for it to imply that the language is still changing :)
> Is it possible to predict the future of Roy, compared to other approaches to
> solve the JavaScript problem, e.g. Fay [2] which looks promising to me but
> has the disadvantage of requiring a rather heavyweight Haskell development
> environment?
Fay is awesome.
The main problem I find is an impedance mismatch between Haskell and
JavaScript. Roy makes changes or sacrifices to lessen an impedance
mismatch.
A good example is laziness. Roy is strict so that it becomes more of a
1-to-1 mapping with JavaScript.
> There are some other subjects that I would like to address:
>
> * Licensing: The current license seems to be the MIT license. Can we assume
> that the compiler, tools etc. (excluding third-party tools of course) will
> be distributed under this license (or similarly liberal licenses, no
> copyleft) in the future?
My personal projects are always MIT licensed. I have absolutely no
intentions to change the license.
> * Community: Is there anybody here who is interested in establishing a
> community around Roy? At the moment this forum seems to be the only place to
> get help, and there doesn't seem to be much traffic. I guess one issue is
> that the major work load is on Brian, who probably has the best knowledge
> about the language internals, but who had happier things to deal with
> lately. Congratulations by the way!
Thanks :)
I've had a couple of people interested in getting into the internals
but it seems people get lost fairly quickly. My plans to address this:
* Make the code more functional to make it easier to understand
* Use more good JavaScript libraries to reduce code in the compiler
* Write some documentation/blog posts about the internals
> * Roadmap: Is there a public roadmap? How are proposals and contributions
> handled?
I've added my current roadmap to the wiki:
https://github.com/pufuwozu/roy/wiki/Roadmap
Proposals have mostly from through GitHub issues but this mailing list
is also a fine place :)
> * Commercial support: Is there anybody here who would be willing to provide
> commercial support, including knowledge about the internals of the compiler
> (bug fixing, extensions etc.)?
I can't but I'd happily train anyone who would like to do any
consulting work with Roy.
> I'm very happy to contribute all the code I produce while improving my Roy
> development infrastructure. Here's what I got so far: A fork of the Roy
> project [3] which uses Optimist to parse the command line arguments and
> allows to pass directories as sources, and an SBT plugin [4]. Both are work
> in progress.
Both are awesome!
Thanks heaps for your interest. Roy is still in progress and it is
still a bit of a pain to work with but I definitely have solid plans
to move it forward. It's taking a bit of time so all of your
improvements is much appreciated.
And I'm sorry for the slow replies, lots of stuff going on ;)