[HN Gopher] Darklang Goes Open Source
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Darklang Goes Open Source
Author : stachudotnet
Score : 134 points
Date : 2025-06-16 15:41 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.darklang.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.darklang.com)
| freedomben wrote:
| Was previously "source available" but is now Apache 2. Good
| choice IMHO!
|
| Also looks like it required their cloud setup to run, you
| previously couldn't run it locally. Now you can, so I think it's
| moving in the right direction!
| cmontella wrote:
| Congrats on Dark for making it this far!
|
| Relevent timeline:
|
| https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financ...
| (2019)
|
| https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ (2020 - in
| which the team is fired to extend runway I guess to today)
| TL;DR: We're taking a longer term approach to building Dark. As
| part of this, we've made the difficult decision to shrink Dark's
| team, and to change how we build both the product and the
| company." So where do we go from here? Right now, the
| team is just me. I am committed to realizing the full vision of
| what Dark should be. Dark is financially healthy for many years,
| and there is time to think and to plan. I plan to involve the
| community much more in Dark's growth, and slowly rebuild the team
| at a pace appropriate to the product's maturity, focusing on a
| small, tight team that can wear many hats.
|
| Then there was a pivot to a rewrite of the whole thing, which I
| think was just Paul at the time:
|
| Start of a new rewrite:
| https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ (2020)
|
| Two years later: https://blog.darklang.com/backend-rewrite-
| complete/ (2022)
|
| seemingly a new pivot to "all in" on AI?:
| https://blog.darklang.com/gpt/ (2023)
|
| No news, one year later https://blog.darklang.com/an-overdue-
| status-update/ (2024)
|
| Would be interesting to the Dark team to revisit this post, which
| is a look at PL funding models:
|
| https://blog.darklang.com/how-to-fund-caramel/
|
| Building programming languages is hard especially when you're not
| backed by a company. I think Eve (I worked on that one) and Dark
| were the two major VC funded languages, and at this point I don't
| think that's a good model for funding this kind of thing. You
| need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled
| directly in to SF landords pockets. Something more like the Mojo
| people have gotten is what it takes (they've raised upwards of
| 100 million).
|
| Anyway I can't wait to see where Dark goes in the future, and
| what their funding model will be going forward.
| greener_grass wrote:
| Mojo's promise is the same code, but faster.
|
| They were planning some language extensions but it's more like
| a compiler project than a programming language project.
|
| The truth is, most developers don't want to learn a new
| language.
|
| They will jump through extra hoops just to use their favorite
| one (e.g. Airflow).
|
| Successful languages appear when there is an extreme market
| demand (C++ providing OOP over C) or, more commonly, a hot new
| platform that people want to get in on (JavaScript, Swift,
| Kotlin, C#, ...)
|
| For most people, new syntax / semantics is considered a
| negative and there needs to be some massive upside to overcome
| that.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Mojo was _also_ less ambitious in a lot of ways. It blows my
| mind the Eve and Darklang guys raised so much money without a
| lot of momentum. I 'd think you'd go the other way, start an
| Open Source project, spend 10+ years gaining a community and
| refining it, _then_ raise money.
|
| In both of the above cases, the founders just got bored of
| their project before they found PMF.
| cmontella wrote:
| You just have to look at the landscape at the time. There was
| a lot of money to be had if you promised the sun and moon,
| because $2 million wasn't a lot compared to the potential
| upside. The problem was, and this is what Paul found out too,
| they wanted to see typical startup metrics before they'd put
| more money in, and it was always going to take more than $2-3
| mil. You just can't demonstrate those with a concept of a
| language.
| greener_grass wrote:
| Do you think Unison will suffer the same fate?
| cmontella wrote:
| No, I mean these low bus factor languages don't really
| die as long as the BDFL keeps working on it. Biggar keeps
| Dark going through thick and thin. Chiusano likewise with
| Unison. Even if their Unison public benefit corp runs out
| of money, Chiusano could probably do what Dark did and
| buy the IP. With my programming language I'm making sure
| that there is no IP and therefore nothing to own. It
| would probably be easy for Biggar to just wash his hand
| of Dark as well but it takes guts to keep going in a
| direction you know it right, and so I'm happy to see the
| project continue.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I'm glad to hear it as I'm very interested in Unison.
| (I've been watching them from the sidelines for ages.)
| For those not in the loop, it's a language where your
| code is stored on disk in AST form, not textually. The
| AST representation is smart in many ways - for example,
| renaming a function is an O(1) operation, regardless of
| how often the function is used. They also have a way to
| serialize Unison functions and send them over the wire to
| other Unison programs, which is pretty sick. Their site
| is here: https://www.unison-lang.org/
|
| (I'm mostly interested in it because I think it would be
| an ideal language for videogame scripting & modding)
| stachudotnet wrote:
| FWIW we also store ASTs, not text. We offer many of the
| same benefits. Some day (soon?) I'll write up a full
| comparison between the two, because it seems a common
| ask.
| rienbdj wrote:
| I can't see teams adopting Unison (or similar languages)
| without a way to store code in Git.
|
| Maybe the editor can load text and do structured editing.
| Maybe the runtime can send functions across the network.
| Great. But not using Git for storage and review is just
| too alien for most teams to even consider.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Paul had created Circle CI, so I can see how investors would
| at least be trusting. Rightly so, I think, as he's not just
| talented but he knows talent.
| khuey wrote:
| > You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million
|
| Mozilla alone invested an eight digit amount in Rust.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Meanwhile Elixir had no such backer.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I don't think open sourcing is going to fix their adoption
| issue. Like the other comments mention, you need to be worth
| the time investment to gain traction. If Dark was truly as
| revolutionary as it was marketed as, it wouldn't have had
| problems staying source available, IMO. Folks will pay or put
| up with whatever it takes to be in the ecosystem (such as
| CUDA).
| pbiggar wrote:
| I agree it won't fit it, but IMO it will remove one of the
| barriers to adoption. The problem with doing something
| revolutionary, is that it's only going to be revolutionary in
| some ways, and it has to compete with things that are mature
| in ways you are not. And the original version (now called
| Darklang-Classic) was quite immature in an awful lot of ways
| that made it difficult to build on.
|
| That's being addressed with the new version of course!
| duped wrote:
| > You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is
| funneled directly in to SF landords pockets
|
| Which is why you should build your team in Denver, Minneapolis,
| Chicago, Detroit, etc. There's a competitive advantage to
| hiring outside the SF tech bubble today. Over the last 5 years
| the network effects in SF have begun to evaporate.
| cmontella wrote:
| Agreed in hindsight, but at the same time there was no place
| else where a couple of 20-somethings could grab a cup of
| coffee with a VC and walk away with a handshake deal for $2
| million dollars. That just didn't happen in Denver et al in
| 2014.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Does that still happen today? Anecdotally there has
| appeared to have been a massive funding crunch for pretty
| much anything that isn't virtual healthcare or AI since
| COVID passed, though I'll be the first to admit I'm not in
| the know on a lot of these things.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| My anecdata is the opposite. I know people getting
| funding for non-AI projects. The most "nontraditional"
| one I can think of is Nautilus [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.nautilus.quest/
| stachudotnet wrote:
| We (darklang) are fully remote! One person in Vermont, one in
| Algeria. :)
| nand_gate wrote:
| Must be nice making SF rates out in Algeria!
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| This is a pretty weird take. Talent in Denver, Minneapolis,
| Chicago etc. is not a whole lot cheaper than in the Bay Area.
| Employees are getting a large (majority) of their comp as
| options or RSUs, so that makes the delta even smaller, you're
| just talking base salary.
|
| If that's "make or break" for you, then something is wrong.
| There are plenty of reasons to want to have a distributed
| workforce (larger talent pool in general, passionate
| employees) but saving money is the least important one here.
| gkapur wrote:
| There was also Wing cloud (fka Monada) and there's Mojo by
| Modular (https://www.modular.com/mojo.)
|
| Feels like two types of companies raised money: - Companies
| trying to couple the cloud with a programming language. - More
| recently, companies trying to couple GPUs with a programming
| language/alternative to CUDA.
|
| Will be curious how this generation goes.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Goodbye Dark, Inc. - Welcome Darklang, Inc_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290357
| thesurlydev wrote:
| I've been following Dark since its inception and found the idea
| inspiring. I'm happy about today's announcements and look forward
| to seeing what comes next.
|
| On a personal note, I'm curious around the move to F# as the
| implementing language and wonder if there will be ports to other
| languages now that it's open source.
| unstruktured wrote:
| To F# from what previously?
| levlaz wrote:
| Ocaml
| spooneybarger wrote:
| OCaml
| ameliaquining wrote:
| OCaml. https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml/
| simonw wrote:
| https://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-darklang-...
| includes this, which is a really interesting pattern that I don't
| remember hearing about before for this kind of company:
|
| > In conversation with our investors and the board, we believed
| that the best way forward was to shut down the company, as it was
| clear that an 8 year old product with no traction was not going
| to attract new investment. In our discussions, we agreed that
| continuity of the product was in the best interest of the users
| and the community (and of both founders and investors, who do not
| enjoy being blamed for shutting down tools they can no longer
| afford to run), and we agreed that this could best be achieved by
| selling it to the employees.
|
| Any other examples of that? I'm particularly interested in that
| for this kind of software product.
| asim wrote:
| Corrected by @justincormack. Post was about Docker Inc.
| justincormack wrote:
| Thats not what happened. There was no new company, the
| company continues to be the same. They didnt sell off the
| business for money raised.
| asim wrote:
| Really? So it was just a recap?
| pbiggar wrote:
| Who are we talking about here? Looks like a comment was
| edited but now it seems like you're talking about
| Darklang?
| stachudotnet wrote:
| They were referring to Docker, after some claims
| regarding some corporate activity (forget details)
| asim wrote:
| I mentioned docker was recapped but also wrongly assumed
| the existing entity was sold off and they formed a new
| entity in that process. Justin kindly corrected me.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| That seems like an exemplary way to handle a failed rocketship
| that nevertheless produced something useful to certain
| customers. Big thumbs up to those who made it happen.
| pan69 wrote:
| > an 8 year old product with no traction ... and we agreed that
| this could best be achieved by selling it to the employees.
|
| Can someone with more business sense than me explain this? Why
| would employees want to buy an 8 year old product with no
| traction? At face value this sounds like a "holding the bag"
| scenario, not?
| MichaelGlass wrote:
| Have you ever been to a great restaurant that happened to be
| on the wrong corner? Or been at a company where one change in
| execution made or broke the company? My guess: the founder
| lost interest but the employees still believed in the
| [impressive] tech. Because of the lack of traction: the cost
| of the tech wasn't prohibitive for the employees?
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| > "holding the bag" scenario, not?
|
| Only if they are buying it for what the investors had already
| put into it, which is not likely. They most likely discussed
| how much the investors values physical assets and trademarks
| the company holds (like how much they are likely to get back
| in a bankruptcy) plus whatever makes a deal fair and maintain
| a happy cordial relationship with said investors for future
| endeavors.
| imadj wrote:
| They're not buying the product. They're buying the company so
| they can pivot and implement their vision.
|
| Basically, the investors lost interest but the team is
| passionate and see a path to success. They won't be
| maintaining the old product, they're going in new direction.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| > investors lost interest
|
| The _founder_ lost interest, he started a new company and
| he is the CEO of it!
| rienbdj wrote:
| Seems more like activism than a company to me.
| necubi wrote:
| It's actually the opposite. They're buying the assets (the
| software), not the company.
|
| > To ensure continuity for users and fans, as well as to
| continue building what we regard as an important
| technology, Dark Inc has sold the assets - the Darklang
| language, the blog, the hosted service, the Discord, etc,
| darklang.com, etc - to a new company started by Dark Inc's
| former employees.
|
| (from https://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-
| darklang-...)
|
| In other words, there's a new company (Darklang Inc.) that
| has purchased the assets of Dark Inc. (for probably
| relatively little money). This clears the cap table, making
| it easier for the former employees (now founders) to raise
| money for the new corporation.
| imadj wrote:
| So, they pretty much bought the entire thing without
| transferring company ownership? It's weird to split the
| information on multiple posts.
|
| They want to maintain the community they have because
| it's the real asset for any open-source project, which is
| the direction they're betting on.
| qwertox wrote:
| I wish the owners of Komoot would have done this.
|
| They sold the company because they didn't see a future of
| growth, and the employees were notified of the sale of the
| company just a couple of days before.
|
| The new owner then fired most of the employees, it's an Italian
| "tech company" (Bending Spoons) which already bough companies
| like Evernote, Brightcove or WeTransfer, and has nothing to do
| with the outdoors.
|
| Komoot was the best outdoor-community app in Germany and very
| popular in Europe, made mostly for hiking and biking.
|
| You can see in this really moving video, made by the employees
| after they got fired, how much they loved their team:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| > Any other examples of that? I'm particularly interested in
| that for this kind of software product.
|
| As far as I know, this pattern is not uncommon among
| traditional businesses. King Arthur Flour Company is the
| largest one that comes to my mind, but on a local level;
| grocery stores, restaurants, mechanic shops, plumbing
| businesses, etc very often "change ownership" this way.
|
| In software, it's pretty common in informal OSS project to
| transition ownership this way when the original owner/author
| loses interest or is otherwise unable to maintain the project.
|
| In terms of commercial sortware, something like SketchUp comes
| to mind, though it's not exact path. It was a startup, acquired
| by Google, then spun off again with its employees
| vanschelven wrote:
| Because the title at the top links to the blog (not the homepage)
| I was a bit puzzled as to what Darklang actually _is_. One more
| click on a similar logo reveals "Darklang puts everything in one
| box, so you can build CLIs and cloud apps with no bullshit, just
| code."
| LtWorf wrote:
| It is no more clear to me now than it was before.
| latentsea wrote:
| No bullshit, except the company going out of business.
| solomonb wrote:
| What are the pros and cons of Dark Lang vs Unison?
| sisve wrote:
| I guess darklang was too far ahead in their thinking in some
| areas and choose the wrong path for other. I really liked the
| deployless idea, but would have loved in even more on-premise. No
| way to get the data to stay in Europe.
|
| Making hard connections between the editor and the lang was
| interesting also. Seems like they have moved away from that.
|
| Hope there is a easy way to set it up locally, i was really
| intrigued when they first launched
| pbiggar wrote:
| Yes, the next version will be able to set up locally - you'll
| be able to install a single Darklang binary and run any
| darklang program without any further steps. See the
| explanations on https://darklang.com homepage.
|
| The issue with the hard connection between the editor and
| language is that each change becomes a massive undertaking.
| Making a language improvement was much much much simpler than
| making the editor change to support it.
| sisve wrote:
| It was a bit hard to understand what is coming and what
| deprecated. As soon as i went into documentation I was send
| to "darklang classic".
|
| How are the deployless senario now? Where you first serve
| only yourself then your team, then beta, then everyone... Or
| something similar to that. I really liked how that story was
| told and how much complexity it removed
| LtWorf wrote:
| Very cool. Now make a page that clearly explains what it is!
| tommica wrote:
| What an interesting project - once this rolls out, absolutely
| want to try it. There is something delightful about the
| fundamental idea of a "canvas" as the code editor.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| > We're now building Darklang to run locally as a CLI
|
| Dark's structure editor looked promising. I'm really disappointed
| that the project moved away from this because a hosted visual
| programming environment felt like the whole value proposition in
| the first place.
|
| Was it the pivot to AI that killed this, was it issues with the
| design of the language or was the structure editor just not as
| useful as it seemed?
| pbiggar wrote:
| Stachu is really interested in bringing back the hosted
| programming environment in some form fyi. Just need to get the
| basics working first.
| apgwoz wrote:
| In theory, Dark and associated infrastructure for running Dark
| apps is the perfect companion to LLM based vibe coding... I
| think, and I am just understanding this now. The goals of
| Darklang were always "no this, no that, not that either." And so
| the focus was not on targeting 3rd party stuff of questionable
| design, but rather a single integrated set of patterns that
| abstracted the messy bits away.
|
| Turns out, the messy bits are the things that turn your vibe
| coded Twitter clone into a full time operations job...
| tnolet wrote:
| Been following from the sidelines for years. Wish Paul and team
| invest in a person good at docs, some web design and copy
| writing. The website, docs, visuals, examples, typography, are
| just very confusing and feel amateurish.
|
| Not blaming. Not everyone is good at everything or wants to make
| time for it.
|
| But a good, well structured landing page with great, real life,
| examples and good hierarchy backed by awesome docs will make a
| ton of difference adoption wise. I hope.
| jitl wrote:
| Epic's new language, Verse, is also well poised for the
| "immutable" future of AI agent coding. Verse uses an effects
| system, and the <transacts> effect is required for any function
| to change a mutable variable. These changes are _transactional_ ,
| so if you have a failure in your <transacts> function, any
| changes it made are rolled back at exit. Code still looks
| imperative-ish, but it's both safe and pure.
|
| (Or, it works something like this. The documentation is hard to
| understand; I'm working mostly on memory from their keynote)
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