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**Paul Biggar:** So that was the frontend. And then the back-end was originally written in OCaml. And OCaml is a really wonderful language, but with a lot of bad things in there that people just sort of ignore; there's an entire object-oriented thing in there that people just don't talk about. |
**Jerod Santo:** Don't use that, yeah. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** OCaml, the good parts. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, for sure. And we'd been using OCaml for a couple of years, and there were very good reasons for using OCaml at the start. One is that it's super-performant; very high performance. Another is that it's immutable, so instead of having to write all these immutable libraries and so on, we just use th... |
So a couple of months ago, weighing up "What should I be doing next? Where is the focus?" and recognizing that the state of Dark is not one where we have a lot of resources, so it made a bit of sense at the time to actually make deep technical investments like that, like doing a rewrite. I thought we were going to swit... |
**Jerod Santo:** The tractor beam is strong on that one. |
**Paul Biggar:** Oh, yeah. So I did. I wrote a series of blog posts on it that were big on Hacker News for a couple of days... And I experimented with Rust, and I did not like it. This does not map to how my brain works... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's how to go to the frontpage of Hacker News... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, exactly. So we didn't pick Rust. And not because anything is wrong with Rust. Rust is very good for what it is good for, and it turns out that Dark is not in that sweet spot. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[24:13\] You know what's an amazing truth that we often ignore? It's that not every language is for every person and every circumstance. |
**Paul Biggar:** Right, exactly. You were asking me earlier what Dark is good for, and I said "Oh, we want people to use Dark for everything", but you're never gonna use Dark for embedded systems, you're never gonna use it for the high-performance, writing a decompressor, or something. "For everything" means in the nic... |
**Jerod Santo:** General purpose. |
**Paul Biggar:** General purpose, cloud, backend sort of things. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Fair enough. |
**Paul Biggar:** And then I eventually settled on F\#. I'm about two months into the F\# rewrite, and most of it is done. All the difficult questions have been answered. There's just a lot of fleshing out to be done. |
**Jerod Santo:** Did you also write about that choice? |
**Paul Biggar:** I did write about it. The short version is F\# is OCaml backed by .NET. So a huge ecosystem, and the ability to reuse C\# things, and high-quality tooling by Microsoft, and so on. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I mean, if the drawbacks for you with OCaml was the ecosystem, and F\# solves that problem, plus it's a lot like OCaml, then it sounds like a win. |
**Paul Biggar:** I mean, it's not even a lot like OCaml. These languages are twins. |
**Jerod Santo:** They are pretty much the same thing. Very cool. We'll definitely link up to those deep dives, as I'm sure people who are interested in language choice, as we all are at certain times in our career, like when we're deciding to switch to a language, would love to hear the deep-dive on your insights there... |
But keeping the focus on Dark Lang, and not so much other langs, I think that one seminal moment for many languages is when they're written in themselves. And it seems like Dark isn't quite there yet. Is that one thing that you wanna do eventually, Dark written in Dark? Or do you think it actually doesn't make a fit fo... |
**Paul Biggar:** I've thought about that over time, what would it mean for Dark to be written in Dark, and there's sort of an obvious one of the bootstrapping. In another language it might be the compiler can finally compile the compiler, and you can stop using the compiler. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Paul Biggar:** I thought about -- okay, so for Dark that would be there's one service, and it's hosting this other service, and that actually doesn't make that much sense for Dark. It just introduces risk, and Dark is fundamentally a hosted platform, and introducing that sort of infrastructure risk doesn't make sense... |
What we're doing instead - we talked a lot about Dark in Dark, and we do it in quite a lot of places. The user flow is in Dark, and the emails that are sent out are in Dark... A lot of the collaboration stuff is written in Dark, some of the tracing is written in Dark... I'm about to rewrite some of our static assets in... |
So anything that's the core language itself and the core of the system is in Dark. And "If this breaks, we would not be able to recreate it" is not written in Dark. So I think I said this backwards; I think I said the core is written in Dark, and I meant the core written in not not-Dark. |
**Jerod Santo:** My brain parsed it the correct way, so I'm with you. |
**Paul Biggar:** Okay, okay. |
**Jerod Santo:** I think that's wise, because any language or ecosystem that wants to be general-purpose and relied upon by many people - it has to live in the real world at a certain point, somewhat early on in its life, so that it's rooted in reality... Because we can tend towards what the maybe more critical \[unint... |
**Paul Biggar:** \[28:06\] Yeah. And I remember at the start, before Dark was really available, a lot of the people who were interested in Dark were the people who were really into programming languages, so I fielded this question of "Can you compile Dark? Can you write Dark in itself? Why aren't you writing Dark in it... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Paul Biggar:** But fundamentally, languages are built for a purpose, and the thing that our language is doing is not building programming languages. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. So complete side-bar, but I'm curious - how did you learn to write programming languages, and compilers, and these low-level things? Where did you acquire that skill? |
**Paul Biggar:** Third and fourth-year compiler class in college. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Straight-up university... |
**Paul Biggar:** Straight-up, yeah. I went to Trinity College Dublin, and I did an undergrad in computer science, and then I did a Ph.D. in compilers... I kind of joke about this, because I hate parsing; I think parsing is the worst thing. So the first thing that you do when anyone writes a language is writes a parser.... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] So now you got me wondering - and I'm not gonna ask this; maybe we'll bring you on the Founders Talk and Adam can talk to you about your CircleCI days... But how does a guy who's into compilers and languages and studies these things ends up founding a CI company? But for a different day. Let... |
Another aspect of the language - I guess the integrated aspect of a language - is that it has built-in support for things that normally you go to a community for... Background workers, scheduled jobs, there's data storage, and stuff like that. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Are these language-level primitives, or are they part of some sort of dark standard library? Is there such a thing? How does it work? |
**Paul Biggar:** They are fully integrated. I'm not really sure what they are exactly. Certainly, databases are language primitives. The important thing is that what you store in a database is actual dark data. So there is no ORM, there's no conversion layer between the runtime representation and conversion into SQL, o... |
**Jerod Santo:** Now you have me interested, because one of the banes of my existence is marshaling and unmarshaling data in between a data store and my language I'm writing it in. I just want it to be there when I come back. I just wanna have this, I just wanna keep it, and I just wanna know it's gonna be there safe. ... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. It was a goal that it would be fully integrated into the language. Or at least into the dark system, or platform, or whatever we call that. So it had to be that these values could go straight into it... But also, the way that you query things in Dark is by writing Dark code. You don't write SQL. ... |
**Jerod Santo:** So what if you do wanna bring your own things to Dark? It sounds like it's probably still too early on. |
**Paul Biggar:** No, it's not. |
**Jerod Santo:** No? You can't use Postgres with Dark. |
**Paul Biggar:** You can't use Postgres with Dark. I mean, in the future someone might write a Postgres adapter/driver, whatever... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so all you would need is some sort of low-level networking \[unintelligible 00:31:28.15\] thing, and then you could just write a network adapter. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. And having direct TCP or something - it's something that will come. But the goal of Dark is not to let you use whatever you're using today. The goal of dark is let's assume that that's all legacy tech, and we want to get rid of \[unintelligible 00:31:50.04\] unconstrained by legacy. Is there a da... |
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