I've tried both ATS and Rust, and I found ATS difficult but mainly from its syntax, not the concepts which need to be learned no matter the language. I think Rust has difficult concepts to learn too, but the syntax is smoother than ATS's.
I'm still dabbling with Rust, but I have chosen to focus on Shen with type checking turned on. I think Shen will wind up with all I need for proving my code. I have tried Idris too, and I think it will capture a lot of the Haskell crowd, and when it evolves further, be a great alternative to ATS or Rust.
I would very much appreciate that article as a follower and fan of your work. You lead me down the Wasp Lisp road! Shen is amazing in that it combines a lot of things I am looking for in a PL. I wish I could contribute to libraries for it, since they will make it more useful from the get go.
Thanks for the kind words, it's definitely on my plans to write such a post.
I'd like to improve the speed of the Wasp Shen port too, it's pretty slow compared to the other ports. Still useable though which is good. I used it in a couple of projects, using the FFI to call Wasp's concurrency routines and it worked well.
I am not in need of speed, since I am learning. I am also learning Zig instead of Rust, and wondered if re-writing Wasp in Zig would be worthwhile?
I left ATS with hopes it would become 'smoother' syntax-wise in the future. I started programming low-level with Basic, C and Asm, went high-level, and now I am back to bit-banging and low-level. I thought Zig and Wasp Lisp would make a tight set of tools for this purpose without being baited to high-end PLs again!
I'm still dabbling with Rust, but I have chosen to focus on Shen with type checking turned on. I think Shen will wind up with all I need for proving my code. I have tried Idris too, and I think it will capture a lot of the Haskell crowd, and when it evolves further, be a great alternative to ATS or Rust.