That's two new languages compiling to Go making HN frontpage in as many days. It seems people like everything about Go except the language itself. Me? I like everything about Go including the language, these transpiled languages are interesting though.

But I keep wondering if they could integrate at a lower-level than the source code. Like how JVM languages integrate at the bytecode level, or LLVM languages at the LLVM level

• MichaelNolan

  last Monday at 7:07 PM

  > But I keep wondering if they could integrate at a lower-level than the source code.

  I’m sure they could, but targeting go source code has the benefit of giving early adopters an escape hatch. If it targeted LLVM directly, I would never consider using this at work since the risk of it being abandoned is too high. But since it targets go source, I would perhaps consider it for some low importance projects at work.

  • seabrookmx

    last Monday at 8:56 PM

    The standard go toolchain doesn't use LLVM. Go has its own assembly format and machine code generation.

• sbrother

  yesterday at 1:54 AM

  > people like everything about Go except the language itself.

  Thanks for putting so succinctly exactly how I feel about Go!

• lenkite

  yesterday at 8:53 AM

  I like Go as well, but I wish the Go team were slightly less conservative about language changes. Only asking for 10-15% less conservatism. It is OK to add one proper new language feature and one good standard library package per year. Or deprecating one language feature and one stdlib package every 2 years.

• nu11ptr

  last Monday at 8:40 PM

  > But I keep wondering if they could integrate at a lower-level than the source code.

  Unfortunately nothing below source code level is stable, so they would constantly be chasing changes after any Go release. I personally wish they would focus on making it accessible, as Go actually has a nice runtime and would make a good language target.

  • melodyogonna

    yesterday at 7:03 AM

    Aha! That would explain things. I was wondering if the Go assembly at least is stable and documented, couldn't really find anything

• anaumann

  yesterday at 12:39 PM

  > But I keep wondering if they could integrate at a lower-level than the source code.

  For my version (aptly named "Goto" [1]), I forked the go compiler with the intent of keeping it up to date. All changes I made only apply to .goto files, .go files compile exactly as is and are interoperable both ways with goto.

  I paused the project due to hitting type-checking bugs when trying to add non-nillable pointers. Everything before was just desugared directly when converting to AST, but for those I needed to touch the typechecker which was too time-consuming for a hobby project back then (pre-coding agents). I might give it another go sometime as I did like the full interoperability aspect.

  [1] https://github.com/goto-lang/goto

• onlyrealcuzzo

  last Monday at 8:12 PM

  What was the other one?

  I'm working on a language that transpiles to Zig with a custom Go-like runtime (and no garbage collector, Rust-style Affine movement instead).

  Sky seems quite cool, as it's additive to Go in interesting ways.

  I originally considered keeping the GC and just transpiling to Go so I didn't need to write a Runtime.

  Go rules! It really does. But I HATE writing/reading Go.

  So I'm glad more people are doing this!

  • styluss

    last Monday at 8:24 PM

    https://lisette.run/

    • onlyrealcuzzo

      last Monday at 9:08 PM

      Awesome, this is very close to what I originally considered.

  • gottorf

    yesterday at 1:48 AM

    > Go rules! It really does. But I HATE writing/reading Go.

    Same. I love the Go toolkits, the compile story, the speed at which it compiles, its backwards compatibility, the fact that stale Go code 10 years old still compile and run, etc., just don't care much for the language itself.

    I wonder if the positive attributes of Go aren't compatible with clever types and other developer-friendly features?

    • throwaway894345

      yesterday at 2:31 AM

      It’s mostly that Go was already pioneering how to build a programming language that had an amazing scheduler, garbage collector, compiler, package manager, formatter, etc. They spent all of their “innovation budget” on the most important—and most neglected—features of any programming language and allowed the language itself to be pretty boring.

      Eventually Go’s runtime and tooling will be bog standard and everyone will think of them as boring and then people will start building more exciting languages on top of them. Assuming AI doesn’t blow everything up.

      • flossly

        yesterday at 8:58 AM

        AI needs strong types just as much as human developers.

        Strong types also improve the interaction between humans and AI: shitty code is way more obvious with strong types. Pure strong-type langs like Elm take this to an even higher level: all cases must handled, such that runtime errors are practically impossible to express.

        I've worked professionally on a large Elm program that has had 5 devs on it, and the promise held out: no runtime error, ever. Other stories for this exist.

  • osigurdson

    last Monday at 11:35 PM

    I understand the motivation as I don't really like writing Go code. Interestingly, I don't mind reading it though (as long as the if err != nil isn't too exhausting).

    A transpilation step though? I'll accept that in Typescript (barely) but not for any other language really.

  • melodyogonna

    yesterday at 7:00 AM

    https://lisette.run/

• ksec

  last Monday at 7:24 PM

  If we think of Go as different kind of C, then having Go as a compiled target seems to make sense as C is a compiled target.

  • flossly

    yesterday at 9:01 AM

    I dont get your reasoning.

• gethly

  yesterday at 8:04 AM

  Go is simple. People like complexity. So the write abstractions to feel better about themselves.

  • phplovesong

    yesterday at 8:54 AM

    Complexity does not equal language features. Sometimes simple is good, but sometimes simple just simply means more bugs in your code.

    As a prime example, Go unwillingness to add even the most simple enum kind of type. Having enums (ADTs) with exhaustive pattern matching is NOT complex in any sense or form. It just takes away so, so many bugs you would normally see in production code.

    One other low hanging fruit is the fact that zero values are in 90% of all cases not what the dev intended. Sure, the mantra goes "make them useful" but thats hard. How to you know if a value (int) was zero initialised, or if the user did in fact input zero as value. No matter, you will need to validate every one of these "zero values" if you want some sort of robustness.

    • flossly

      yesterday at 9:01 AM

      Adding `null` to C was very simple to add. It added a lot of complexity that the language designer did not see coming (hence the billion dollar mistake he made on that).

      • phplovesong

        yesterday at 12:30 PM

        `NULL` was originally added to ALGOL back in 1965. C was not even a thing back then. It was obviously a bad choice to port NULL to C, one that ADTs would have perfectly modeled, without the billion dollar cost.

        In fact C was built sometime around the early 70s, and at the same time the first MLs where also being developed. One added null, while the other added a better mechanism for "nothingness".

        Bottom line is you cant compare "adding null" and adding a feature that is over 50 years old, one that is battle-tested thru generations, and still holds up.

        Solid maths does no suffer bitrot.

        • flossly

          yesterday at 12:41 PM

          ALGOL indeed. I stand corrected.

          https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...

    • 9rx

      yesterday at 2:49 PM

      > Go unwillingness to add even the most simple enum kind of type.

      Go has enums, under the iota keyword. But I imagine you are really thinking of sum types. Technically Go has those too, but must always have a nil case, which violates what one really wants out of sum types in practice.

      Trouble is that nobody has figured out how to implement sum types without a nil/zero case. That is why you haven't seen a more well-rounded construct for the feature yet. This is not an unwillingness from the Go team, it is more of a lack of expertise. Granted, it is an unwillingness from those like yourself who do have the expertise. What stops you from contributing?

      > It just takes away so, so many bugs you would normally see in production code.

      What bugs do you imagine are making it to production? Each pattern matched case has a behaviour that needs to be tested anyway, so if you missed a case your tests are going to blow up. The construct is useful enough that you don't need to oversell it on imagined hypotheticals.

• throwaway894345

  yesterday at 2:24 AM

  LLVM and JVM have stable interfaces. Go has an intermediate representation but it isn’t stable. Anyone who wanted to depend on it would be on the hook when the implementation changes.

  • flossly

    yesterday at 9:02 AM

    From what the community says, it's pretty stable (as in BW compatible).

• last Monday at 10:05 PM

I will add this to my list of Elm-inspired tools that call to mind Brian Eno's quip about the first Velvet Underground album: "I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!" With Elm it feels like it's 1% of Elm users creating a language.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/01/velvet/

• bbkane

  yesterday at 4:45 AM

  You should publish your "Elm-inspired tool" list- I bet it's pretty large. Off the top of my head: iced, react redux, bubble tea (Go lib), Roc lang.

  I'm sure there are lots more. I'm still waiting for someone to write an "Elm retrospective" and examine its rise and stagnation

  • 1-more

    yesterday at 5:13 PM

    I left this comment a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45752905 when someone asked what was up with Elm at the current moment. I left a bunch off.

    - Evan entered hermit mode to create Acadia, a language for an Elm-like experience querying the database. He's given conference talks about it but none have been recorded. https://acadia.engineering/ This seems to have the same goals as Lamdera.

    - Evan hinted that 0.19.2 is coming and has asked for help profiling it https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/help-me-profile-elm-0-19-2-....

    In the meantime the ecosystem is getting crazy evolved. Turns out not changing the language under your feet for a few years leads to lots of development with what's currently there. Frameworks like elm-pages allowed for command line utils in Elm like elm-codegen. Elm-review lets you write linting rules with autofixes unlike anything I've used in other languages. A few people are writing forks and non-forks that target more than the browser or self-host the compiler. Every backend language I've used with decent types has a package to generate Elm types (and their decoders, and a nice way to interact with the JSON API, and deal with glue code generally).

    Literal forks of Elm compiler

    - Gren (general purpose lang targeting browser, CLI, servers) https://gren-lang.org/

    - Zokka (fixes a few compiler bugs and allows for custom package repos) https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/a-new-zokka-version-bringin...

    - Guida (self-hosted compiler) https://guida-lang.org/

    Forks that do not ever seek to change the syntax of the language and thus compile .elm files

    - Lamdera ("non-fork" fullstack with evergreen migrations) https://dashboard.lamdera.app/docs/starting

    - Eco (written in Elm targeting x86 binaries via MLIR and LLVM) https://github.com/eco-lang/eco-runtime

    - Elm-run (targeting CLI and servers, self hosted) https://elm-run.dev/roadmap

    Languages inspired by it whose creators are big Elm users:

    - Roc (general purpose): https://www.roc-lang.org/faq

    - Gleam (targets Erlang VM and browser) https://gleam.run/cheatsheets/gleam-for-elm-users/

    - Cara https://cara-lang.com/

    Things that use the Elm architecture in other languages (linking to pages that mention the connection where possible):

    - Foldkit (Typescript) https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/foldkit-the-elm-architectur...

    - Iced (Rust): https://book.iced.rs/

    - Bubble Tea (Go): https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

    - Lustre (Gleam): https://github.com/lustre-labs/lustre

    - A list of TEA-in-Swift and React in Swift: https://gist.github.com/inamiy/bd257c60e670de8a144b1f97a07ba...

    - Redux (Javascript/Typescript): https://redux-toolkit.js.org/rtk-query/comparison

    If you read this far and are wondering which to check out, I cannot endorse Lamdera enough. Use the same types from your DB to your frontend and write zero glue code. Migrations required to update the running frontend/backend whenever you change anything. Really changes the way you write code.

    • eeue56

      yesterday at 8:07 PM

      You're missing Derw from that list: https://www.derw-lang.com/. Predates all the others, and is from a former core team member (me). I'm also the author of server-side Elm experiment known as [take-home](https://github.com/eeue56/take-home) from 11 years ago. I can see a lot of patterns in Sky's codebase which seem trained on Derw's codebase.

      Also authored the first Elm-in-Elm compiler for a limited subset for json-to-elm, then leading to a pure Elm virtual-dom implementation used for elm-html-test!

      • 1-more

        yesterday at 9:55 PM

        I KNEW I forgot one. I'm really sorry. This list was off the dome and I was hoping to hit a Cunningham's law situation (which I did) without making anyone feel left out (which I failed).

        • eeue56

          today at 7:34 AM

          No worries at all! I didn't take offense, it's very easy to forget one or two projects when quite frankly, Elm has managed to spawn or inspire so many!

Nice to see another language with Haskell / Miranda type syntax, but the vibe-coded implementation sure shows: e.g. src/Compiler/Infer.sky isUpperStart:

    isUpperStart : String -> Bool
    isUpperStart name =
        case String.slice 0 1 name of
            
            "A" ->
                True
            
            "B" ->
                True
            
            "C" ->
                True
        ... for 23 more cases.

• bonesss

  yesterday at 6:22 AM

  I started my career cleaning up systems written by solo devs in the pre internet era. I’ve seen a lot of starts_with_UCase() implementations like that.

  I see now I’m going to end my career cleaning up systems written by chronically online vibe coders, making all the same mistakes, with none of the excuses.

• voidUpdate

  yesterday at 10:16 AM

  Does this language use ASCII or Unicode strings? I think this implementation is technically correct for the strict subset of ascii characters, but as soon as you add more, it stops working. EG I'm pretty sure Á or Ó are capitals, and are included in Windows-1252 which is apparently extremely common in non-unicode strings, and there are a huge amount of unicode characters that are uppercase, in which case this function isn't even slightly correct

• toastal

  last Monday at 9:19 PM

  Haskell/Miranda use `::` instead of `:` for type signatures unlike Elm & basically the rest of the family which prioritize types being less keypresses than list cons.

  • taolson

    last Monday at 9:42 PM

    Sorry, I meant "Haskell / Miranda style syntax" -- e.g. curried functions, concise syntax with little boilerplate, etc. The word type is too overloaded ;-)

• yesterday at 12:57 AM

at first glance this looks amazing! basically provides everything I have ever wanted in a full stack language. looking forward to experimenting with it.

edit: looking through the docs/examples some more, it looks like javascript interop is fairly clunky, both because it relies on string concatenation to embed fragments of javascript, and because the string concatenation syntax is not great (and the formatter makes it even worse - see the example at https://github.com/anzellai/sky/blob/main/examples/13-skysho...)

I would encourage you to at the least add multiline strings with interpolation support, and ideally add a small compiler for html literals.

This is awesome! I love Haskell's syntax, but its adoption isn't where I'd like it to be.

One thing that I don't see is a way to mitigate the "andThen" pyramid of doom.

This happens when you have a language without early returns and you have chain multiple Result returning operations. You can use nested case expressions:

  case operation1 x of
      Ok value -> case operation2 value of
        Ok value2 -> value2
        Err msg -> "error from operation2: " ++ msg
      Err msg -> "error from operation1: " ++ msg

  operation1 x
     >> mapError (\msg -> "error from operation1: " ++ msg) 
     >> `andThen` (\value -> operation2 value)
     >> mapError (\msg -> "error from operation2: ++ msg)

Haskell has `do` notation to alleviate this but that brings with it the type-class that shall not be named.

Some languages, like Rust, introduce different per-type syntactical solutions such as `async/await` for Promises and `?` for Result.

I particularly like Gleam's `use` notation, which is syntactical sugar around functions that take a callback as their final argument.

Do you have a solution for this in Sky?

Functional languages have some good and some bad features and there's no reason to copy them all. For example, you don't need to have a Hindley-Milner type system (bidirectional is better) or currying just because it's a functional language.

• troupo

  last Monday at 7:17 PM

  We need more pragmatic languages. E.g. Erlang and Elixir are functional, but eschew all the things FP purists advocate for (complex type systems, purity, currying by default etc.)

  • rapind

    last Monday at 9:37 PM

    If you like Erlang, Elixir, and Elm/Haskell, then Gleam + Lustre (which is TEA) is a pretty great fit.

    • yesterday at 12:40 AM

  • zem

    last Monday at 8:21 PM

    ocaml has a complex type system but it's also very pragmatic in that it doesn't force you into any one paradigm, you can do whatever works best in a given situation. (scala arguably goes further in the "do whatever you want" direction but it also dials the complexity way up)

    • phplovesong

      yesterday at 8:56 AM

      Ocaml's typesystem is rich, but not as complex as TypeScripts. It seems TS just adds more obscure features every year for little benefit.

    • troupo

      last Monday at 8:32 PM

      Yes! Completely forgot about OCaml because I only spent a couple of months with it

Keeps saying "no websocket required" like it's a good thing. The JS client (https://github.com/anzellai/sky/blob/main/docs/design/sky-li...) seems to rely on long polling.

Phoenix LiveView (the inspiration) defaults to using WebSockets because it's much more efficent, but falls back to Long polling if not available.

Elm's type system and architecture are genuinely pleasant to work with, so seeing those ideas ported to a Go compilation target is interesting. You get the safety and expressiveness of Elm but end up with a Go binary you can deploy anywhere. I wonder how the error messages compare, since that was always one of Elm's strongest features.

• flossly

  yesterday at 12:41 PM

  The resulting binary is, well, binary. Not Go. Or I miss something.

Wow, this is amazing. I always wanted to love Haskell but never really managed, Elm nailed the balance of usability and correctness, plus the architecture was beautiful.

I've never liked Go, but its strengths are absolutely compiling to single binaries, fast compile times, and concurrency primitives (not necessarily using them) etc. Compiling to Go is a great idea.

I think you have an interesting spot in the design space here...

Have you seen Lamdera? They have a way to use Elm on the server-side that is supposedly acceptable to the Elm-BDFL Evan Czaplicki.

https://lamdera.com/

This talk explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T6nZffnfzg

Sky does all on the server (more popular lately with HTMX and LiveView), where Elm+Lamdera is basically 2 project and Lamdera ties you into a propietary-ish ecosystem.

• mhitza

  yesterday at 9:53 AM

  Giving even a modicum of care of what Evan has to say in 2026 is a good joke. Only thing he's known outside the Elm community (aside from Elm) is how to antagonize your own community.

Great work :). Go doesn't have TCO. That means functional languages (no for loops) could blow up the stack. How did you solve that?

• kubb

  last Monday at 7:43 PM

  You can just compile any tail recursive function to a function with a loop and no recursion.

  • 1-more

    last Monday at 8:11 PM

    This is in fact how Elm does it! Tail call recursion compiles to a while loop.

  • srean

    last Monday at 9:17 PM

    That does not address the use case where I find tail recursion most tempting. That would be mutually recursive functions.

    If the function can be written as an idiomatic loop I probably would do so in the first place.

    • apgwoz

      yesterday at 1:51 AM

      You _can_ do trampolines, but that is kind of infectious, or needs to be very explicit with extra code, etc.

      • srean

        yesterday at 10:39 AM

        Indeed. It's not very efficient though. If I remember correctly Scala does this.

  • adamwk

    last Monday at 8:01 PM

    Right but recursion is only a smaller part of why the optimization is important. It means tail-called functions still build on the stack and long function chains—as is common with fp—can overflow

  • last Monday at 8:48 PM

Very cool.

I am comparing this https://github.com/anzellai/sky#tea-architecture with this https://harcstack.org (my thing) ... guess I have some work to do ;-)

It is a very good attempt, but I am quite pessimistic about the prospects of new programming languages in the AI era. Unless, of course, it is a language specifically designed for AI coding — for example, one that is self-contained and carries a great deal of contextual information, making it unsuitable for humans to write but highly suitable for large language models. That kind of future would probably be quite promising.

First - awesome job. Congrats. Self hosting is an accomplishment!

But I'm curious to get your thoughts on the process in hindsight.

I understand why it's valuable: to cast a wide net in catching bugs and give a good signal that your language is generally "ready".

I'm working on a similar language, but worried about going down the self-hosting path, as I think it'd slow me down rather than speed me up.

How did it work for you?

• eeue56

  yesterday at 8:13 PM

  Derw, a human written Elm fork by me, is largely self-hosted. I took that decision with inspiration from Go: 1) it gave me a large codebase which could be used to assess language features on and 2) it gave me motivation to improve generalized performance rather than focusing on the niche use cases (web-rendering).

• ModernMech

  last Monday at 9:28 PM

  What's the actual accomplishment here? It seems like the language came into existence a month ago and was written mostly by Claude. If self hosting is a matter of asking Claude to do it and it takes a couple weeks, is it really an accomplishment at all?

  • onlyrealcuzzo

    last Monday at 9:39 PM

    Anything + Go's runtime is a reasonable language.

    Go's runtime is one of the greatest pieces of software ever built.

    Assuming this works - which self-hosting guarantees a minimum level of "working" - this is useful!

    I didn't want to rely on the unpredictability of a garbage collector, so I chose to build my own runtime, but it's not going to be as good as Go any time soon.

  • Philpax

    yesterday at 12:06 AM

    "I could have made that!"

    "Yes, but you didn't."

  • troosevelt

    last Monday at 9:38 PM

    Yes, somebody has to actually do it, and they did.

Somewhat unrelated to the language itself:

> The compiler bootstraps through 3+ generations of self-compilation.

I guess it applies to any language compiler, but f you are self-hosting, you will naturally release binary packages. Please make sure you have enough support behind the project to setup secure build pipeline. As a user, we will never be able to see something even one nesting-level up.

• troad

  yesterday at 12:29 AM

  I feel like there's too much of a fetish for self-hosting. There's this pernicious idea that a language isn't a 'real' language until it's self-hosted, but a self-hosted compiler imposes real costs in terms of portability, build integrity, etc.

  If I ever write a compiler - God forbid, because language design is exactly the kind of elegance bike-shedding I'll never crawl my way out of - it's going to be a straight-up C89 transpiler, with conditional asm inlines for optional modern features like SIMD. It would compile on anything and run on anything, for free, forever. Why would I ever give that up for some self-hosting social cachet?

  • p1necone

    yesterday at 1:06 AM

    If you wrote the C89 outputting transpiler in your own language it would still be just as portable.

    • troad

      yesterday at 4:18 AM

      I'd be dependent on pre-existing binaries that are closely wedded to a particular platform (OS, libc etc), and it over time it would become more and more difficult to attest to build integrity / ensure reproducible builds. (Is the ARM build meant to run an x64 emulator as part of some lengthy historic bootstrapping process?)

I would love to see Java inspired language compiled to Go. I really like Go portability and standard library and Java... verbosity. I prefer explicit names, types and all the syntax around that. Graalvm is not an answer for me because as far as I'm aware it doesn't support cross-compile.

• weavie

  last Monday at 10:22 PM

  You could make it happen in about a week and $50 worth of tokens.

Can’t wait to play with it. Great design!

A bit too bleeding edge for me, but it does look super nice (ie exactly like Elm).

If you allow FFI are you really inspired by Elm? ;)

• zem

  yesterday at 12:00 AM

  they're inspired by repeating elm's good features and fixing the bad ones!

Compiles to Go or transpiles to Go?

• farfatched

  last Monday at 8:34 PM

  Either is fine.

  ``Formally speaking, "Transpiler" is a useless word''

  https://people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/transpiler-formal/

• 9rx

  last Monday at 8:42 PM

  You are free to use whatever word you want. Even "bloopydoopy", if you so wish. But "compiles" is best.

Elm is a language I enjoyed the most. I love Ruby, I loved some other languages, even Haskell I enjoyed, but Elm is special. So let's make this work.

Now that you got foundation created, let's see how to move it forward.

wow this is pretty cool!