Four Years of Jai (2024)

I’ve been programming for long enough to be righteously cantankerous about a lot of things. The list of languages, frameworks and libraries I’ve worked with professionally or on personal projects is too long to list – but it includes everything from C and assembly languages through C++, Pascal and Delphi, through Java and Clojure, through Perl, PHP, Python, Javascript, Typescript and so on. I’ve tinkered with Rust, APL, Uiua, Erlang and Haskell. I’ve been around the block a few times. So let me just open this discussion by saying: I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly, and I know how big the “ugly” category is – how ridiculously small the “good” category is. Which is why, when I first heard of Jai, I was intrigued. The central focus made sense: a language of comparable performance to C, but with modern idioms, conveniences and tooling – a language aiming to be a powerful alternative to C++ in environments where performance is everything, while emphasizing the importance of program ... Read full article.