Top all-time · #1282
Darklang
Company blog · blog.darklang.comprogramming
Darklang is the company blog at blog.darklang.com, writing about programming. Since 2020, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 90 times, most often “Dark’s new backend will be in F#”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 33 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dark's blog for its move from OCaml to F#, its versioned stdlib and fast deploy design, and its later shutdown and open-sourcing. Most comments cite posts as background rather than judging them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 33 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Dark’s new backend will be in F#9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-11-03
- Leaving OCaml7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-11-02
- Darklang is going all-in on AI6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-03-28
- Goodbye Dark, Inc. – Welcome Darklang, Inc4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-06-16
- How's the Dark Rewrite Going?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-03-19
- Dark and the Long Term3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-10-06
- Dark is a holistic programming language, and structured editor3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-28
- How to Fund CaramelLang?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-15
- /how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-11-03
- Real Problems with Functional Languages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-07
What Hacker News says?
There are at least a few nascent statically typed languages (as in, full static typing rather than gradual) which nevertheless let code with type errors compile for the sake of testing. The two that I know of are Darklang [0] and Roc [1] which aim to let you compile code with type errors for the same reason you suggest. [0] "Dark is designed for continuous delivery. As such, we don’t like requiring you to make large…
Comment linking /real-problems-with-functional-languages/
on “Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years”Submitted Dark’s new backend will be in F# as a story · 347 points
HN discussionI have often thought about what a truly intuitive, simple, easy, user-friendly VCS would look like. Git is fine for programmers, but what about non-programmers, or student-programmers? Would it be possible to make a VCS that my mother could use without sacrificing too much power? One thing I would give up easily is decentralisation - a centralised model is more straightforward, and, for better or for worse, most peo…
Comment linking /how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/
on “Git is too hard”Submitted Leaving OCaml as a story · 237 points
HN discussionDarkLang which was initially written in OCaml eventually switched to F#. From what I remember the main reasons were the library ecosystem and concurrency. I'm know .NET in and out, so I might be biased. Most of the boring parts have multiple good solutions that I can pick from. I don't have to spend time on things that are not essential to the problem I actually want to solve. I've used F# professionally for multipl…
Comment linking /new-backend-fsharp/
on “OCaml as my primary language”Submitted Darklang Goes Open Source as a story · 165 points
HN discussionThat's right, we version all stdlib functions. I talk about it a bit here: https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/ When we add a new version of a function, all the calls to the old function are unchanged. The autocomplete shows new users the new version (and not the old version), while people who are calling the old version get shown both.
Comment linking /how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/
on “Dark’s new backend will be in F#”Submitted Why Dark didn't choose Rust as a story · 130 points
HN discussionAlso only one person is working on it - everyone else in the dev team seems to have been let go/fired. https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/
Comment linking /dark-and-the-long-term/
on “Dark’s new backend will be in F#”Submitted Thoughts on Rust vs. OCaml as a story · 84 points
HN discussionGood point! I quickly updated the blog post with a blurb. Was not expecting this to be #1 on HN! > Welcome HN! If this is your first time hearing about Dark, check out the website[1], our What is Dark [2] post, and How Dark deploys in 50ms [3] to understand what we're about. Thanks for checking us out! [1] https://darklang.com [2] https://blog.darklang.com/what-is-dark/ [3] https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys…
Comment linking /how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/
on “Dark’s new backend will be in F#”Submitted Goodbye Dark, Inc. – Welcome Darklang, Inc as a story · 43 points
HN discussionSemi-relevant: Dark is being rewritten _from_ Ocaml[0]. [0] - https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml/
Comment linking /leaving-ocaml/
on “Dark’s new backend will be in F#”Submitted I'm as shocked as you, but the Darklang back end rewrite is complete as a story · 42 points
HN discussionIt looks like Dark is trying to be a new language, a backend server, a CI solution, and an IDE! Then there is a blog post that everyone churns: > Currently, we get 10 user signups a day, and on average, 0 of them stick. We do have developers who love Dark, but not enough. https://roadmap.darklang.com/goals-of-dark-v2 I think the company should focus on just one of those things and it would still be an enormous lift…
Comment linking /dark-v2-roadmap/
on “Dark’s new backend will be in F#”Submitted An overdue status update on Darklang as a story · 17 points
HN discussionI spent some time last night looking at it. Just to affirm what you're saying, there's hardly any information on their frontpage unless you go venturing into videos and blog posts. Dark is basically a language that's designed to be serverless out of the box. They've baked their own engine into the language as well as dependencies for various cloud providers, databases (postgres was highlighted a lot), etc so that yo…
Comment linking /spin-up-a-slack-app-in-seconds-with-dark/
on “Dark’s new backend will be in F#”Submitted Darklang: Leaving OCaml as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThat's a pretty weird takeaway considering the long and detailed post on OCaml's issues that motivated a full rewrite: https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml/ > One of my biggest annoyances was how often OCaml folks talk about Fancy Type System problems, instead of how to actually build products and applications. In other communities for similar languages (ReasonML, Elm, F#), people talk about building apps and sol…
Comment linking /leaving-ocaml/
on “Dark’s new backend will be in F#”Submitted Rescript-Tea: The Elm Architecture for Rescript as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSo I'm creating something that's exactly like the author is describing: https://darklang.com He's right that there's no reason that things shouldn't be fully Serverless, and have instant deployment [1]. These are key parts of the design of Dark that I think no one else has managed to solve in any meaningful way. (I'll concede that we haven't solved a lot of other problems had still need to be solved to be usable and…
Comment linking /how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/
on “Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist”Submitted Darklang Release 6 as a story · 9 points
HN discussionHere is the article about Darklang leaving OCaml, nothing here is about performance https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml/ . It's about ecosystem and dev experience. About Flow, I've never used it so I can't say, but Rescript (which is written in OCaml) compiles 10 to 100 times faster than Typescript.
Comment linking /leaving-ocaml/
on “Lang Jam: create a programming language in a weekend”Submitted Darklang – Year in Review 2021 as a story · 9 points
HN discussionAnd, indeed, F#, per the followup article: https://blog.darklang.com/new-backend-fsharp/
Comment linking /new-backend-fsharp/
on “Leaving OCaml”Submitted Darklang is going all-in on AI as a story · 8 points
HN discussionFollowup post: https://blog.darklang.com/new-backend-fsharp/
Comment linking /new-backend-fsharp/
on “Leaving OCaml”Submitted Darklang Release 2 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis was why I chose F# instead of Rust for the Darklang rewrite [1] - I just couldn't get async to work well, and the hoops and complexity I had already had to get it even close to working were way too much. [1] https://blog.darklang.com/why-dark-didnt-choose-rust/
Comment linking /why-dark-didnt-choose-rust/
on “Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work”Submitted Optimizing Tasks in F# as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
