Short description

Summarize this content to 100 words Introducing the new Moonbit programming language, which is specially optimized for creating programs that compile to the universal WebAssembly intermediate code. The project of the new language was announced by Hongbo Zhang – the main developer of the ReScript programming language, as well as a specialist who participated in the development of the OCaml and Flow languages.According to OpenNET, the key development goals of Moonbit are: providing a simple syntax, high compilation speed, and generating compact and fast WebAssembly intermediate code. Multiple code generation backends are provided, including a backend for JavaScript and native code.The need to create a new language is explained by the fact that the development of applications for WebAssembly in low-level languages, such as C++ and Rust, is associated with the complexity of learning and slowing down development due to long compilation. High-level languages ​​like Go are easier to learn and write programs in, but lag behind in terms of efficiency and compactness of the resulting code. Moonbit developers tried to combine the best aspects of low-level and high-level languages ​​in the context of their use with WebAssembly technology.To achieve high program execution performance, the Moonbit compiler uses a multi-level intermediate code (MLIR Multi-Level Intermediate Representation), which provides additional optimization opportunities that take into account control and data flow graphs, as well as more efficiently use the processor cache. The use of MLIR makes it possible to carry out optimization and exclude redundant structures more evenly, takes into account the structure of the entire program as a whole, rather than its individual parts.To obtain high compilation speed and improve integration with development environments, Moonbit supports parallelization of operations during compilation, performs semantic analysis at the level of individual functions, and can use incremental recompilation of newly changed code. To minimize the size of the generated code, the Moonbit language initially does not support constructs that may prevent the detection and removal of unused code, and the structure of the standard library is optimized to include only the code required by the application.The Moonbit language supports multiple programming paradigms, including elements of object-oriented and functional programming, provides a simple type system, and implements a data-oriented architecture.The Moonbit syntax is designed with the simplicity of Go in mind and some advanced Rust features, such as support for pattern matching, type inference, generics, and specialized polymorphism (type similarity). To simplify development, Moonbit, like the Go language, uses automatic memory management and recursive closures. At the same time, unlike the Go language, Moonbit initially does not support potentially dangerous elements such as pointers.As part of the Moonbit project, a full-fledged development platform is being developed, which includes a compiler, assembly tools, a package manager and an integrated development environment, which can be accessed through a web browser (both cloud work and offline launch are supported). A plugin for the VSCode code editor is also available. Currently, the project is in the initial stage of alpha testing, where only the binary builds of the compiler and the online environment for conducting experiments are available.The developers of the new language said that the source texts of the compiler and the tools developed by the project will be open on GitHub after the first beta version is ready, which is expected to be released in the middle of next year.

The given Moonbit programming language is optimized for creating programs that compile to WebAssembly