The Costs Of Programming Language Fragmentation
robert.ocallahan.org/2018/10/the-co
Conversation
Admittedly, the costs of fragmentation may be an artifact of the weaknesses of our toolchains--multi-language interoperability has been underdeveloped thus far. The work by Amal Ahmed et al. (arxiv.org/abs/1711.04559, arxiv.org/abs/1707.04984) is quite interesting in this context.
1
2
Yup, if you are building a new language today, I think you should definitely be looking at doing it in a type preserving way, even if the ecosystem is not yet there to support it. Also consider exit strategy - how to help folks get out of your language if things don't pan out.
It's a good point that the costs of fragmentation can be reduced. Many languages are CIL or JVM-based to reduce the fragmentation penalty.
1


