New competitor to D

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Tuesday, 26 July 2022 at 11:12:15 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> I'm still struggling to understand why would Google goes to the 
> effort of creating a new language (that they seemingly don't 
> want to manage alone in the long-run) instead of forking 
> Calypso. AFAIK Carbon is similar to Calypso. It all just seems 
> really expensive.

They build a compiler so that they can change and extend C++ 
semantics with full freedom, including improved semantic 
analysis. Calypso would be a drop in the ocean and even more 
limiting than evolving Clang (they are not evolving clang as 
such).

I don't know if they mind maintaining the compiler themselves. 
Most likely they need a proof of concept and industry backing to 
get management approval for a bigger budget. Also, you get better 
tooling such as dedicated IDEs by being open.

In the end I assume they will fork clang and maintain their own 
C++ parser/semantic analysis in addition to maintaining a Carbon 
compiler written from scratch. I assume they have millions of 
lines of C++ code and the Carbon repo will pass 10 times the 
number of likes that is on the DMD repo in another week (they are 
close to 20K likes after only a week). Despite the syntax…

Or… maybe they will drop it after a year and take their 
design-artifacts as improvments to ISO C++. Either way, the 
Carbon team doesn't have much to loose from this approach. (The 
risk is on the early adopters.)