Four Years of Jai

Summary

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 programmer morale. This seemed like music to my ears, and I followed the occasional updates for years. Then, in early 2020, I got invited to join the Beta. From what I could tell I was about the 20th-or-so person to join it. Now it’s four years in, and further, even though it’s still in closed Beta (I’ll come back to that), I have been using Jai professionally for the last three years – a decision which could be considered controversial, but I’ll address that in this essay. What I’m going to cover here is: The high level overview Things I like Things I don’t like Using Jai professionally The status of the Beta The road forward But, this essay will also be 0-indexed: 0. The lost era of good software Software has been getting slower at a rate roughly equivalent to the rate at which computers are getting faster. The causes of this are manifold. Some of it is attributable to the maxim that became popular in the 90’s, that software developers were more expensive than faster hardware, so they should ...