do folks have a feel for how Unison and Darklang contrast with one another? both seem to have broadly similar goals

Unison seems quite interesting - but the huge advantage I see dark has is a custom editor which at some points has great UX. Unison seems like it will get stuck in the ‘hobby language’ category unless a first class editor is made for it. The language itself has some pretty cool ideas, love the abilities.

@Ian Rumac Unison started more editor-oriented and shifted to “make the language first” but if you’ll see Paul’s earlier posts the editor is a big part of his grand vision. Also mentioning Lamdu which has similar goals but our focus is “first the editor and we’ll finish the language later”.

unison seems more concentrated on distributed computing from first principles whereas dark is more concerned with burning down the enormous mess that is devops. @pbiggar / @ellenchisa should be able to weigh in here (is the unison team in slack?)

Yeah, the way to unison team put it to me is that unison would be something you’d build dark in

I'm glad the unison editor stuff is at least preserved on the blog; some useful tidbits there.

The main difference I see is Dark provides a language, an editor and a runtime with a database - all integrated so e.g. the editor can display runtime and database info. It is also hosted so you don't have to run the servers. Unison is mainly a language and runtime, you use any text editor and some unison tooling but code is stored in the file system. I'm not sure how you actually operate the runtime. Do you run it on one machine or multiple? How do you point it to the code you want to run, etc. - I believe this stuff is still not fleshed out. I also don't think it has a database, but I'm not sure.

been a while since i typed the original question, but thanks for the input! structured editing is what got me psyched about Unison in the first place, but sounds like that's more Dark's territory nowadays