Hello readers!

We’ve pulled together a selection of articles from the UNDONE programming world that we think are worth sharing… This time we’ve focused on names that may sound like Pokemons, but they're actually innovative new languages and runtimes 🙂 So, get ready to learn more about Zig, Wasm, Rust and Roc. Happy reading!

When Zig is safer and faster than Rust

Have you heard of the Zig programming language? Zig is an imperative, general-purpose, statically typed language aimed at systems programming. This may remind you of Rust. And indeed, they both target the same type of programs. However, there’s an argument for using Zig over Rust that isn’t mentioned as often as it should be: unsafe environments. Check out this blog, which summarizes a first-hand experience of implementing a byte-code interpreter in an unsafe environment using both languages.

The Four Domains of Wasm

If you don’t know what WebAssembly is or you think it’s just a universal byte code for browsers, read on. You’ll learn there are a number of other interesting use-cases for it, including IoT/embedded devices, plugins and cloud deployments. Its adoption is growing, and we expect that it will get even more serious when WASM runtimes support advanced features, and compilers from various languages mature.

Why use Rust on the backend?

We’ve more or less come to accept that Rust is the new go-to language for writing systems and low-level programming. As a result, I believe a lot of us programmers have considered it for writing higher-level applications too, and this article tries to address exactly that. Is it wise to write backend APIs (data models, serializers, database access, etc) in Rust knowing we have to deal with the memory management model?

How Roc Compiles Closures

Roc is shaping up to be, in my opinion, the most interesting emerging FP language (maybe alongside Unison). Created by Richard Feldman, there’s really very few design choices that I wouldn’t agree with. Have a read of this article to dive deep into some of its compilation aspects and reasoning for its chosen strategy.