I'd agree more except that as far as I know (I'll admit I've not been following the development that closely) he's been significantly building it in public on Twitch. So he's happy to spend time sharing it with the public, and has been from the start; it's just taken a long time to get it to a usable state.

> If you are fine with getting there 80% his claim is correct. That he's using the language for his games proves it to me. Of course, if you require it to be both open and popular to be a success you kind of reach a stalemate. In a world where everyone can quickly whip up a language I would expect most to be closed to the public anyway.

I think we're firmly in agreement here, except that IMO the default for software that's not for public consumption is to throw it over the wall, put the source up on GitHub or something, and not bother with documentation, explanation, or interaction. A carefully curated closed beta is kind of the opposite of that. If anything he's spending more time promoting it than I would expect.

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> that is probably 10% of a PL if you want it to do something people will actually use

I think this is really understating the challenge of generating machine code that is competitive in terms of size, performance, etc. with state-of-the-art compilers. I'll be the first to agree that it's far from the only (or even the biggest) difficulty in PL, but it remains a huge chunk of engineering work. The interesting part of this experiment is how much of that work, as a percentage of the work of building a programming language, is now given to you for free, for a language that is indeed mostly ‘just a syntax wrapper over C-like functionality’.

(Of course, a big part of ‘people will actually use’ is nothing to do with the language at all, but the next twenty years of building an ecosystem and community buy-in.)

My understanding is that thinks C++ sucks period (an uncontroversial opinion even among C++ devs).

His reasoning was that C was a pretty minimalist language introducing structured control flow and little else, yet it's flexibility and neutrality has allowed people to explore lots of approaches.

C++ on the other hand is highly opinionated, and a lot of its opinions are considered wrong or at least controversial (template metaprogramming, RAII, exceptions, diamond inheritance, just to name a few).

A lot of the C++ community doesn't use these features (for example Chrome, LLVM have exceptions turned off).

Jai on the other hand goes heavily into typed AST macros (along with a reasonably powerful type inference enigne), a very powerful extension of the language, that this language has gotten right - the feeling you get when looking at the docs is 'well, duh it obviously has to be done like this' - considering how long it took devs to arrive at this system suggests this is far less an obvious task than it looks like.

Other than this, what the language offers over C isn't much - it shares Odin's 'context' idea that you can inject an allocator or logger function and have your methods use that - which is kind of the point imo.

Blow, as outspoken and controversial a figure he is; seems to have designed a pretty unopiniated language - something designed for master programmers (like ones he has worked with in the games industry, who worked mostly in C) to express themselves, rather than a set of 'correct' opinions the language imposes on you.

Imo it's a shame it took so long to release, as I'm p. sure Jai would've been much more influential 2-3 decades ago or more, and would've had a good chance to dethrone C++.

LLVM doesn't have to be great for its existence to make PL dev a lot easier. Codegen used to be a real pain.

The interesting part to me was always that he didn't justify Jai very much. He didn't assert that anybody else would want to use it, or that it would be universally better than C++. His claim was that he didn't need to: building a language is now so quick that he can make a language just for him, just because he feels like it. Everybody can have their own language frontend.

https://youtu.be/TH9VCN6UkyQ

Famously, as with many other things in computer science, writing a toy programming language is doable in a couple of hours, but writing a usable programming language that needs to stand up to real programs for users is typically somewhere between a decade and a lifetime of work.

If he'd announced the language twelve years ago and then not touched it again until a few months ago I'd believe you. But there's plenty of documented evidence that he's been spending a bunch of time on it, and (allegedly) even using it in his commercial projects.

If he raises interest in the language by saying it will be open source (which he did), I think it's fair for people to dismiss the language until he does actually open source it.

Putting stakes into a language that will essentially be DOA, like the author does seems like a crazy decision.