Recently, MoonBit, the first industrial-grade programming language in China, known as the "leader of domestic programming languages", announced that it has officially entered the beta preview version.
The preview version of MoonBit Beta introduces important features such as modern generics, accurate error handling, and efficient iterators earlier than most major languages, marking a new phase in the MoonBit ecosystem, providing users with a more stable and smooth innovative operation experience. It is no exaggeration to say that MoonBit has taken more than two years to achieve the results that the current mainstream programming language can only achieve in five years or even longer, and MoonBit is comparable to or even surpasses the 1.0 version of most mainstream languages in terms of core language features. According to MoonBit's official website, its application scenarios are positioned in cloud computing, edge computing, artificial intelligence, education and other fields, and the standard library and build system have been open-sourced.
Introduction to MoonBit Technology Compared to other mainstream programming languages, MoonBit has two significant differences. The first point is that MoonBit was born after the emergence of ChatGPT, which gives the MoonBit team a better opportunity to reimagine how the entire programming language toolchain can work with AI-friendly collaboration without too much historical baggage. Another point is that thanks to the team's more than ten years of experience in programming language development, MoonBit has considered how to integrate the language and tools (IDE, debugger, static analysis, package management, etc.) from the top level design. These two points made MoonBit build a cloud-based IDE and code generation assistant for MoonBit at a very early stage, and innovatively adapt to the AI model from the beginning of the underlying construction, which is a native programming language in the AI era. Moreover, MoonBit has relatively obvious advantages in this field in cloud computing and edge computing with its high optimization of WebAssembly, which makes us very optimistic about the prospects of MoonBit. 1. Fast running and compilation speedThrough the global optimization of multi-level intermediate representation (IR) customization, the memory layout is improved, the first-level cache utilization rate is improved, and the high performance of compilation and runtime is ensured. In terms of compilation speed, MoonBit compiles 626 packages in 1.06 seconds on the WebAssembly platform, which is nearly 9 times faster than Rust and runs only 35 times faster than Go.
2. Small code sizeMoonBit has significant advantages over traditional languages in terms of output Wasm code size. From the very beginning, MoonBit language features are designed with static analysis tools in mind to better eliminate dead code, and the code size of Wasm components written by MoonBit is greatly reduced compared to other programming languages. For example, the output file size of MoonBit is only 27KB for a simple HTTP server, while the output of Rust in the http-hello-world template provided by WasmCloud is 100KB, TypeScript is 8.7MB, and Python is up to 17MB.
3. Multiple security guarantees: A robust type system is one of the important designs of MoonBit to ensure its security. MoonBit uses a powerful type system and a built-in static detection tool to check for type errors at compile time, and MoonBit's own static control flow analysis can catch abnormal types in the compiler, thereby improving the correctness and reliability of the code. Another layer of security for MoonBit is its native support for WebAssembly, which allows MoonBit to tap into Wasm's security architecture in terms of sandbox environment, memory isolation, and deny-by-default. Unleash its potential for cloud computing and edge computing security with these advanced security features. At the same time, combined with the security of the language's own type system, it deletes useless code (DCE) and compiles it into verified Wasm instructions to ensure code trustworthiness and data privacy security. 4. Best Data Processing ExperienceMoonBit As a multi-paradigm programming language, MoonBit focuses on providing the best experience of data processing while maintaining the simplicity of the language. MoonBit achieves efficient data processing through innovative native support for JSON processing, iterative type and pattern matching, and combines the flexibility of a dynamic language with the security and efficiency of a static language in terms of syntax design, and intuitively and concisely parses and transforms data.
MoonBit's syntax design on data processing is designed to optimize common data processing scenarios and solve the performance problems caused by generating multiple intermediate arrays in traditional methods. In the Iter performance comparison, MoonBit processes data up to 25 times faster than JavaScript.
At present, MoonBit already supports Wasm and JS backends, and experimentally supports native backends. This means that whether it is UI, client, edge computing or system programming, users can find their own use cases on the MoonBit platform, so that the ecosystem can cover all possible application scenarios, according to the data published by MoonBit, there are now more than 10,000 loyal users, and it is believed that the number of MoonBit users will grow more rapidly in the near future. It is worth noting that MoonBit not only provides an online IDE for users to experience directly, but also provides a compiler explorer for compiler enthusiasts to explore the internal structure of the MoonBit compiler in real time. Although MoonBit is a programming language that is currently in beta preview, it is surprising that there are already official commercial users using MoonBit to build database products, and CSDN noticed that at the MoonBit offline seminar on September 1, a graph database company gave a presentation as the first commercial customer of MoonBit, highlighting the advantages of MoonBit in building innovative graph databases. It's rare to be trusted by manufacturers for commercial products at such an early stage, quoting a comment from the audience: "We have been waiting and seeing, but I'm excited to see that some manufacturers have officially started using MoonBit, and we will let our R&D team enter the game next week."
MoonBit Global Programming Innovation Challenge
In order to better cultivate future talents in the field of programming languages, MoonBit recently launched a global programming innovation challenge. The competition is guided by the Shenzhen Park Development Department of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Zone in the Loop, the IDEA Research Institute is the organizer, Tencent Cloud, Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation, Alibaba Cloud Tianchi and Fubao Sub-district Office of Futian District, Shenzhen are the co-organizers, and invited Shen Xiangyang, Founding Chairman of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Digital Economy Research Institute, Lin Huimin, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Director of the Academic Committee of the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, IEEE Life Fellow, Academician of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences, Ni Mingxuan, Founding President of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), served as the honorary judge, and CSDN served as the community partner.
The competition ➕ is divided into "Programming Language Design and Implementation" and "Game Development" tracks, and it is expected that contestants can use MoonBit to carry out whimsical ideas and explore the field of hardcore programming languages. Online courses will also be set up for the contestants, and the teams that stand out in the preliminary round will be invited to the finals to have face-to-face in-depth exchanges with the big names. As one of the community partners of the competition, CSDN recommends interested developers, especially college students, to sign up for the competition.
MoonBit's internationalization It is worth mentioning that MoonBit has not only attracted much attention in China, but also is quite popular overseas, after CSDN also reported that MoonBit appeared on the popular technology information aggregation website Hacker News, and then was reported by the well-known media The New Stack many times, and even in the developer community zenn.dev in Japan, MoonBit also appears frequently, and more and more international users are paying attention to and trying to use it MoonBit, MoonBit's social media platform, shows that an United States developer used MoonBit to participate in a local hackathon and won the second prize, proving that MoonBit is comparable to or even surpasses some of today's mainstream programming languages to a certain extent. MoonBit coincides with the transformation of AI models, but more importantly, there is a group of people who are working hard to lay the foundation in the field of basic software technology, so that more and more domestic basic software scholars and industrial developers can accumulate on their own platforms, which will be of great significance to domestic basic software. China has the largest developer community of programmers, and we believe that there is an opportunity for a phenomenal programming language to be born in China. CSDN will continue to track the progress of MoonBit, let's look forward to the future transformation of MoonBit! 1. Moonbit, a domestic programming language, has emerged and topped Hacker News for the first time! 2. Formed in less than 11 months, 100% completely self-developed, he is determined: to make this programming language "world-class"!
3、深圳团队研发的编程语言 MoonBit 在日本知名开发者社区 Zenn 爆火 4、在线IDE: try.moonbitlang.cn5、编译器explorer: https://ir-09-08.moonbitlang.cn/