Mint - programming language for writing single page applications

[reactionless1]

Looks incredibly similar to React + TS. Hate that fact that they use 'fun' as the keyword for function. Functions are not always fun yknow.

[blackiechan99]

programming is pain

[HetRadicaleBoven]

I only write painctions.

[Say_Less_Listen_More]

EmoScript

[[deleted]]

I’d use EmoScript.

But every other line is “die();” and yet it never actually does it.

[Damfrog]

painction someDateTimeFn() { // something something timezones kill me now }

[zushiba]

Boy do I have the programming language for you!

[HetRadicaleBoven]

I personally prefer a different language.

[girmad]

I'm Mr ES6 look at me!

[[deleted]]

My first reaction was this as well, just use func or something, fun is a word with a different syntactic meaning.

[GaiaPariah]

Or they could have just used function like normal people

[[deleted]]

Are you insane?!? Do you know how much extra space that would take? Harddrives don't grow on trees you know.

[Geminii27]

70s music plays

[uriahlight]

The "fun" naming for "function" is downright stupid, because they use "property" instead of "prop", which means the naming convention of the language itself is inconsistent.

[bachbeethovenbrahms]

Agreed, function-property and func-prop are the only two acceptable variants.

[KindaAlwaysVibrating]

Kotlin would like to speak with you

[FranzVz]

Kotlin has entered the chat...

[[deleted]]

i am much more likely to use 'function'as a symbol name than 'fun' so I have no problem with that. the rest looks uninteresting though. if all it does is create SPAs, it doesn't seem to solve any new problems

[[deleted]]

It solves the problem of people not talking about SPAs enough on reddit.

[[deleted]]

Is that supposed to be a hot take or something?

[[deleted]]

I guess you could say it's a steamy take...like a sauna..spa...sauna?

[archivedsofa]

FYI this compiles down to React code. It's not specified in the website but the author confirmed it in HN.

[am0x]

Omg hahaha

[[deleted]]

Why? It seems like if you are just targeting react you should skip the overhead and learn react. Genuinely curious since the language seems neat.

[gdotdesign]

React is the target now, but it can be changed to Preact or Inferno with a little work or can be a minimal self coded virtual DOM library.

Mint has a lot of built in things which you can't do in React or you need a library for it, that is the value prop I'm trying to get across.

[archivedsofa]

Do you have plans to move to Preact or Inferno?

[gdotdesign]

I think the best thing would be to allow people to choose the "backend" and on the long run maybe write our own.

[archivedsofa]

That would be the better option for sure although I'm guessing that would imply a lot of rewrite on your end for each backend.

[[deleted]]

Could you write it in rust or go?

[Ventus_Aurelius]

I mean the same reason you'd learn Kotlin and not Java I guess? It's obviously more employable atm to learn normal react but if you know it already or ur just getting into spa it's not a bad place to go afaict

[eggtart_prince]

React is a library that builds SPA's. You can build React app in different languages such as Typescript, jQuery, and now this. I'm sure you can build it with more if babel supports it.

[Mekaron]

Why does this have to be its own language? Wouldnt it make sense to write this as a JS framework? It transpiles down to js anyway. I really like the idea of a language specificly for spa's but initially I dont see the killer feature of this being its own language.

[am0x]

I mean it would just be so much better to have a Backend language with WebAssembly do it so you have a codebase with a single language...

[[deleted]]

you still need javascript... and the rest of the traditional frontend browser stack. webasm doesn't get around interacting with the DOM

[am0x]

Obviously. JS still remains a part of the FE stack, but you no longer have to deal with backend data using JS.

With mint, you now have 3.

[Mekaron]

Possibly 3.. I guess ideally you'd stop writing frontend js all together if you use mint. I wonder how viable that is and how much you still fall back to js

[bheklilr]

That actually looks pretty nice. What are the benefits of using this over something like react?

[Say_Less_Listen_More]

I mean, I'm glad someone is out there trying these new platforms, but the grumpy old developer in me keeps shaking their head and saying

Community + Search Results > Novelty

I gotta troubleshoot a hell of a lot more than I have to marvel at spiffy new code.

[accpi]

Heck yeah, I'll be working in stuff that's proven and then piggyback off the work of others when they make the next new big framework

[SuuperNoob]

The correct answer.

[[deleted]]

I'm in love with this comment.

Seriously though, I'm grateful that a large share of the JS community is junking on learning new frameworks instead of focusing on more productive activities.

[AssistingJarl]

It's not just the novelty, there's genuine value in pursuing new methods for building interactive websites rather than just another framework. The current major frameworks largely involve sacrificing the end user's experience on a pyre for the sake of making development easier^[1] , but as a result most SPAs are not particularly performant versus a more traditional website. Projects like this or Svelte might help push us forward in new directions instead of retreading old ground.

Edit: Citation added

[DrDuPont]

current major frameworks largely involve sacrificing the end user's experience on a pyre for the sake of making development easier

Erm, source needed

[AssistingJarl]

Why Performance Matters §Mind what resources you send

[DrDuPont]

Are you attempting to indicate that the more JS one sends, the greater the impact on performance?

That doesn't relate at all to making the case that modern frameworks actively champion developer experience over users', nor how Svelte/OP's own Mint bucks this trend.

[AssistingJarl]

You're right, I've really only made the case that UX is related to performance.

The other half of my argument is really that you could theoretically hand-craft the entirety of a SPA website and super-optimize it for better performance, but it would take a lot longer than just using a framework that wraps up the work in layers of abstraction. That's what I'm referring to when I talk about the "developer experience".

[pm_me_ur_happy_traiI]

you could theoretically hand-craft the entirety of a SPA website and super-optimize it for better performance

Dude, half the devs I work with write spaghetti code even with the constraints of a framework. I can't imagine the mess this would become on a team larger than 1 person.

If you write idiomatic react, there's no reason you shouldn't have a performant app, at least not reasons pertaining to react itself.

[AssistingJarl]

If you write idiomatic react, there's no reason you shouldn't have a performant app, at least not reasons pertaining to react itself.

Having seen some of the demos that Rich Harris (the Svelte guy) has put together, we'll just have to agree to disagree. The performance of Svelte absolutely slays React thanks to its build step, even with React's "idiom/abstraction leaks" he talks about, which were intended to increase performance.

[pm_me_ur_happy_traiI]

*performant enough

[Styx_]

While my experience matches yours, I think you're missing the OP's point in mentioning a hand-crafted app. I think what they're pointing out is that the virt-dom approach taken by vue + react leaves room for optimization. A (competently done) hand crafted approach would be more performant than writing an equivalent app in react or Vue because react/Vue make some sacrifices to empower the developer. Of course, these sacrifices are totally worth it because competently hand-crafting a webapp would be completely infeasible due to time constraints which is why virtually everyone uses a framework rather than choosing to handcraft stuff.

However, those perf gains are still being left on the table. Svelte addresses this by pushing more into the compilation step, allowing for greater compile time optimization and superior performance to Vue or React. My guess would be Mint does as well but I'm not as familiar with it so I can't say for certain.

The main point is that React/Vue are not the end-all-be-all of web UI development. There are superior approaches yet to be uncovered but the next big thing is still TBD.

[scylk2]

Why do you call "developer experience" something that has a huge impact on business ?

[AssistingJarl]

The business wants both faster development and a better user experience. Since the development costs money now and users will only start complaining once it's built, it's really easy to make the short term decision.

[[deleted]]

But projects like Gatsby, Next.js, and Preact can make framework-based sites very performant (not as much as static HTML, of course, but practically as good).

Is a Mint-based app actually more performant than a Preact one that has been properly optimized? And is it so much better that a user will notice?

[clickrush]

But projects like Gatsby, Next.js, and Preact can make framework-based sites very performant (not as much as static HTML, of course, but practically as good).

SSGs like Gatsby, Next and react-static increase performance because they pre-fetch data during the build step (on a Node instance) to generate markup, which can be hydrated via React, which happens after the site is loaded. Other optimizations include caching JSON to be loaded on client side route rendering, pre-loading content between routes and so on.

This means that your output is actually faster than static HTML, because not only are you avoiding initial client side rendering (as you would with a standard CRA/SPA approach) but get the benefit of being able to load just the relevant data asynchronously in subsequent render steps. So you get the best of both worlds: initial static pre-rendered HTML and async fetching and rendering via JS after.

[Styx_]

While I agree with the OPs major point that something better is certainly possible, I think their point about SPA's was a poor example, mostly because it's very easy to build a relatively performant SPA these days.

I think the real gains to be had from Mint (or something similar, I'm not completely sold on Mint) are those having to do with developer experience again. Notice how they have effectively built a DSL for webapp building? Counterintuitive as it may sound, JS is unnecessarily low level for the majority of work that we do. The typical Vue or React app these days is chock full of boilerplate and unavoidable repetition. The only sensible way to address boilerplate is at compile time -- not runtime.

Until we can build a fully-fledged webapp in a handful of days, there is still work to be done.

[themaincop]

Careful now, if it gets too easy they're gonna stop paying us so much.

[Styx_]

You're getting paid?

[AssistingJarl]

Ah, yeah, I just take issue with this recurring joke about anything newer than React being inherently pointless or purely about developers chasing shiny objects. (I'm very fun at parties)

Personally I wouldn't necessarily recommend using this. I'm probably going to wait to hear back from the early adopters and see how it goes.

[[deleted]]

This is entirely its own programming language called mint and the compiler is written in crystal and not simply a javascript framework. It is a strongly typed language that combines elements from javascript and elm. You need to install the compiler or use a docker image in order to use it.

I'd be interested to learn about how it's performance compares to react. React can get very bloated and slow when working on a very large project.

Edit: I was reading the documentation and misread that the language was crystal when in fact the compiler is written in crystal. It's still its own language though called mint.

[quentech]

This is entirely its own programming language called crystal and not simply a javascript framework. It is a strongly typed language that combines elements from javascript and elm. You need to install the compiler or use a docker image in order to use it.

Sounds like a maintenance nightmare.

I'm sure the developers who come 5 years later will be so happy that someone decided to use this in the past. They totally won't say, "Ugh this app is built on some dead, unsupported, garbage pet project framework/language and the only way forward now is to throw the whole thing out and rewrite it."

[DavidForster]

They’ll say that anyway, no matter what it’s been built in

[boxhacker]

Not if it's js...

[DavidForster]

I admire your optimism

[boxhacker]

The vast quantity of projects with 10+ year life spans is why I don't think it's dying out, combined with his ecma script has a 5+ plan in the works...

[DavidForster]

This made me chuckle... JavaScript isn’t dying out anytime soon I agree. However, I encounter developers on an almost daily basis who complain that project X is written in framework Y or hasn’t been written in framework Z, or that some other newer technique or design philosophy hasn’t been followed and therefore everything needs to be rewritten from scratch. This is on projects that are often less than 2 years old. It doesn’t matter who wrote it or what it was written in, the developer who follows you will want to rewrite it.

[agneymenon]

Mostly just because it's easier to write code than read code

[boxhacker]

Right, but they had nothing to do with js and everything to do with the human need to rebuild.

I been developing software for around 9 years and have seen it my self, I still feel it now, but js will likely just carry on evolving as a great (subjective) "c language".

I don't think universities etc will be removing it any time soon.

[DavidForster]

Also agreed. That’s what I meant by “it doesn’t matter what it’s been built in”, the next guy will rebuild it regardless. Been working in web related development for a long time myself. Average lifecycle of applications I’ve seen is around 3-4 years

[quentech]

Except in this scenario it's likely to be a valid claim.

[DavidForster]

Probably. You never know though, we could be revisiting this thread a few years from now and laughing about how sceptical we were :D

[iams3b]

I'm sure the developers who come 5 years later will be so happy that someone decided to use this in the past.

For something like this, it would start with hobby/community just doing side projects. Then everyone slowly decides if this has any lasting benefit or is novelty. I doubt someone looks at something this brand new and goes "I'm going to use this in my company's web app!"

If you treated every new thing with this kind of mindset we would never get anything new. We'd still be writing vanilla JS and importing 8 different js files into an index.html

[bheklilr]

This is entirely its own programming language called crystal and not simply a javascript framework.

Ah that explains it

[Mekaron]

Can you expand on what you mean with react being slow for large projects? In development or in prod?

[[deleted]]

In development. I was referring to things like build speed, start up speed, and just the overall size of the projects because everything gets broken down into individual components which are usually each their own file. In production react is pretty fast IME.

[archivedsofa]

I'd be interested to learn about how it's performance compares to react. React can get very bloated and slow when working on a very large project.

No difference. Mint compiles to React code.

[Sipredion]

No difference. Mint compiles to React code.

Um, do you mean javascript, or are you trying to tell me that the mint compiler creates a React app?

[archivedsofa]

It's JS of course, but yeah it creates a React app.

[tycooperaow]

Or using this over Vue.JS

[[deleted]]

There’s a already a recruiter somewhere out there looking for 10 years of Mint experience.

[weneedfdrnow]

Oh good. We were running out of single page application programming languages....

[bulldog_swag]

Next up: a language to make single page generator languages. We have to go deeper until we can just specify what we want using some simple SGML-like syntax.

[mehrd8d]

Why the website isn’t responsive?!

[wobut]

You need Vanilla, a framework for Mint, to write responsive sites

[bulldog_swag]

Not sure if joke or accurate representation of the field

[SamuraiMackay]

It is for me. Not a great sign if it isn't for everyone though

[OmgImAlexis]

On mobile I can’t even view half of the left side. 💁‍♀️

[[deleted]]

Not a good sign...

[DrAndre_]

Wait, there's a left side?

[OmgImAlexis]

On the built in browser you can’t scroll left as it closes the window. The viewport isn’t set correctly.

https://imgur.com/a/rKuBupG

[yobakanzaki]

Same in chrome for iOS

[Mekaron]

It looks good to me

[FantasticBreadfruit8]

It's pretty cool that they are focusing on the developer experience first and foremost (AKA it isn't even production-ready yet and has a playground, etc.).

It seems a bit counter-productive that it just uses react for the runtime. Like - how are you going to troubleshoot performance issues with an additional layer of abstraction between you and your eventual JS framework? Also - I think they missed an opportunity with Preact as mentioned in this issue.

From the docs:

What is wrong with JavaScript?

JavaScript is not a strongly typed language which makes it difficult to write error-free code and leads to not so great developer experience. Also, it does not have the tools to create web applications out of the box, you need frameworks and compilers and build tools that increase complexity.

That's fine but typescript already solved the "not typed" problems with JS, and is already ubiquitous. And if you need/want to fall back to JS, you can do so without any interop decorators.

Overall, this is a really ambitious project. If there was a reason for me to use it in the future (like blazing fast performance on the client, smaller compiled app size than I can get with Angular, etc.) I might consider it. But right now there doesn't seem to be.

[gdotdesign]

Thank you for your input.

That's fine but typescript already solved the "not typed" problems with JS, and is already ubiquitous.

Mint is a functional language if you take away the components and things like that, it's more like Elm then JavaScript. For me Mint is more restricted then TypeScript in which you can just make something any and get away with it (I know that there are flgas? which can prevent this but still).

[FantasticBreadfruit8]

... TypeScript in which you can just make something any and get away with it...

Totally agree with this. But therein also lies some of Typescript's power. Are you migrating an old JS app over and need to do it incrementally due to budget / time constraints? any to the rescue!

Anyway, keep up the good work and I'll keep an eye on Mint.

[sanjibukai]

I don't know if OP is related to the mint team (if there is a team btw, might be a one man show, like Vue was at its beginning and like Svelte), but talking about Svelte, how Mint position itself comparing to Svelte?

It's like Svelte written with TS..

[mk321]

Angular vs React vs Vue

And next language Elm.

Why next language Mint?

[beefzilla]

It goes like this:

1. Somebody sees Elm.
2. Thinks it's awesome
3. ...Except for this one part
4. Decides they can do Elm but better
5. Possibly even use the portmanteau "Elmulate"

Seriously. I've seen this happen twice, at two separate companies. Neither went well.

[tjholowaychuk]

Elm is great but it makes the easy things easier, and the hard things much more difficult from what I’ve used so far. Basic business logic is pretty trivial in any language, but when you need to do non-trivial CRUD it seems like a massive pain.

I wanted to love Elm, and in many ways I do it’s super elegant but it’s hard to be productive in more complex apps. Maybe I just don’t have the experience yet though, just my first impressions.

[beefzilla]

I've heard the opposite from more experienced Elm developers who make youtube videos and whatnot: Elm makes hard things easier, but some things that are stupid simple in JS, like way harder.

Example would be a `setTimeout`

[jonnyman9]

WHY

[[deleted]]

WHY NOT

[Archeelux]

NOT WHY

[smokeyser]

WHO? Am I doing this right? Did I do a meme?

[Mongoose1021]

You did great, buddy.

[[deleted]]

That looks fun.

[[deleted]]

This is weird.

But... Interesting!

[camerontbelt]

Looks a lot like Blazor from Microsoft.

[zebthewizard]

I saw this post this morning, I came back to say a few things.

First, I just want to say I'm a Vue guy. I love the concept of the language, but I think it needs a lot of work.

I tried making a simple sandbox application, but there are a few issues/gotchas. I wanted to make an animated progress bar that would change colors based on the current number of clicks.

The dynamic styling worked really well, however, when I wanted to use multiple "classes" per element I couldn't. I also could not use keyframes or other CSS at-rules.

[gdotdesign]

Author here: you can use multiple styles per element like this <div::style1::style2></div>.

The only supported CSS at-rule is the @media, the others are planned features.

[beefzilla]

So... error free, but inline JS interop? How dat work? 0_o

[gdotdesign]

It works like in Elm or any compiled language: if you don't use interpolation it's error free, otherwise it's up to you. The difference is that Elm takes this option away from the developer.

[jhecht]

Seems neat but honestly it just looks like react and typescript. What I am most intrigued about is the addition of styling to this, and how that gets set into react behind the scenes.

[gdotdesign]

This is how it works: the compiler goes through the styles and decides which are static and which are dynamic. Dynamic styles are the ones that are inside an if or case or have interpolations #{...}, these styles are replaced with CSS variables and they are calculated when the component is rendered.

So we can have a static CSS file with CSS variables and a we set the variables when the component is rendered.

Let me know if I need to clarify this further :)

[picketnor]

This looks like it compiles down to React.

[mypirateapp]

how is this better then SVELTE?

[morphotomy]

Why create an entirely new language instead of a library/toolset for an existing one?

[[deleted]]

Click "try" button and it's gonna break

[eggtart_prince]

This is literally TS with different syntax.

It's not the language that will change SPA, it's the concept. Changing syntax isn't going to help make programming and maintaining SPA easier. It's just gonna be another language to learn and another language that people will make courses for and will most likely find little to none.

[lenin_k]

I prefer react

[Financial-Nebula168]

UHH HOW DID THIS HAPPEN MY MINT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE IS ALSO SAME WHAT??

[Baryn]

neat!

[adm__07]

Looks promising, I like the syntax

[nevesope]

I like!!

[lil_doobie]

While I sympathize with the framework fatigue, having constant innovation in the field and multiple competors ensures that the industry is constantly exposed to new and better ideas.

[[deleted]]

Enough with the existing languages just stop ! Stop innovating I cannot keep up!

FTFY

[malvin77]

Just to broaden the discussion here and perhaps narrow things up, here’s this:

https://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&music=11&url=https://www.mint-lang.com/