Curated Picks

An Ada Forum thread in December 2025 noted community concern over Ada/SPARK's absence from recent ACM SIGPLAN research videos on formal verification and software quality. Developer Heziode announced Aclida, a formally verified CLI framework under development, aimed at addressing the ecosystem gap highlighted by Rust's system utility rewrites. Participants pointed to concrete adoption barriers, including packaging complexity for Linux distributions, unfamiliar tooling, and the lack of compelling proof-of-concept projects. While no agreement emerged on whether outreach should be driven by AdaCore or the community, several contributors argued that focusing on safety-critical niches rather than broad adoption was a more realistic direction.

Anthropic ($350B valuation) acquired Bun to power Claude Code. Bun's runtime is written in Zig. The Ziggit community discussion reveals competing emotions: excitement that Zig now powers critical infrastructure at billion-dollar scale, but anxiety about influence from a company whose AI coding tools feel philosophically opposed to Zig's "no hidden magic" ethos. One observation: Anthropic may have secured "the bargain of the century" in acquiring Jarred Sumner, whose obsessive performance optimization perfectly embodies what attracts engineers to Zig. The thread validates both Zig's commercial readiness and its community's resistance to compromise on principles.

GitHub Actions has reached the point where CI scheduling feels nondeterministic. In Zig's case it stalled the entire build pipeline so badly that even manual retries weren't enough to recover. Andrew Kelley attributes this to Microsoft's AI-first shift and the explicit "embrace AI or get out" stance from leadership, which he argues has degraded engineering priorities. Zig's move to Codeberg is a concrete response to platform reliability falling below an acceptable threshold, even with years of ecosystem lock-in.

On November 18, 2025, a global Cloudflare outage stemmed from a failure in their bot management service, internally named FL2, which was partially written in Rust. According to Cloudflare's technical post-mortem, the root cause was a database permission alteration that caused a metadata query to return over 200 items, exceeding a strictly pre-allocated memory buffer of 200 slots. The service attempted to append these items via a function returning a Result, which failed and produced an Err. This error was met with a .unwrap(), causing the thread to panic and the service to crash.

The subsequent discussion on r/rust, centered on Cloudflare's blog post, debated whether the unwrap was the fundamental cause or a symptomatic failure that exposed deeper systemic issues. Many commenters argued it revealed insufficient validation of internally-generated configuration and a lack of canary deployment practices, with the panic serving as a beneficial circuit breaker that prevented silent corruption. Others contended that while expect() would have provided marginally better logs, the core failure was a flawed assumption about database query results.

Concrete outcomes from the analysis include Cloudflare's public commitment to treat internally-generated configurations with the same rigor as external inputs. The incident also fueled community advocacy for enforcing lints like clippy::unwrap_used and clippy::expect_used in production CI pipelines, and reconsidering panic strategies (e.g., panic = abort) for faster failure detection in distributed systems.

A podcast series featuring engineering leaders from CyCognito, Metabase, Red Planet Labs, JustOn, Mobot, and HolidayPirates offers a cross-section of long-term Clojure usage in production. At CyCognito, Yehonathan Sharvit describes a system processing millions of events per second, but notes that most engineers still favor more mainstream languages for career reasons, which has driven a partial migration toward TypeScript. In contrast, Nathan Marz argues that Rama's roughly 200,000 lines of Clojure, representing a decade of R&D, would have been impractical to build in other languages due to its reliance on macros and enforced immutability.

Cam Saul from Metabase highlights a different dynamic, pointing to successful contributor-to-employee conversion via their open-source project and the ability to ship enterprise-scale features with teams of four as a sustained advantage. Across the interviews, a consistent theme emerges: moves away from Clojure are driven primarily by hiring and market perception rather than technical limits, while teams that stick with it tend to emphasize small team productivity as the key factor.

A February 2025 Hacker News discussion of Bozhidar Batsov's "Why F#?" blog post generated over 400 comments examining the language's commercial viability. In a detailed reply, user raphinou cited selecting F# for a Ruby on Rails rewrite, emphasizing its practical approachability, seamless .NET ecosystem access, and Hindley-Milner type inference as critical for maintaining a large codebase. Participants noted the community's shift from Slack to Discord and extensively debated asynchronous programming ergonomics, with many asserting the task { } computation expression introduced in F# 6.0 resolved earlier C# interop friction.

Critical observations included reports of slower compilation in large projects, F#'s status as a secondary priority within .NET, and a constrained hiring market. Counterpoints emerged from practitioners like user Foofoobar12345, who reported running an ~80-person pure F# company, arguing that capable developers achieve productivity within weeks and that the language yields robust, refactor-friendly systems. The thread also recorded C#'s ongoing incorporation of F#-inspired features, reducing its syntactic uniqueness but affirming its architectural influence.

Tangible outcomes referenced included raphinou open-sourcing the resulting application (myowndb) as a case study and multiple users confirming F# deployments in backend services, web APIs via Giraffe, and cross-platform UIs using frameworks like Fabulous, despite acknowledging its niche professional footprint.

In March 2025, a technical article by Bozhidar Batsov detailed a re-evaluation of F# after a 15-year hiatus from .NET, citing the platform's open-source shift and F#'s functional design as key motivators. The author notes Microsoft formed a dedicated F# team in Prague in 2022, leading to active development evidenced by F# 9.0's release in November 2024 with quality-of-life improvements. Technically, the analysis highlights F#'s ML heritage, seamless .NET interop, and distinctive features like type providers and the pipeline operator, which facilitate succinct data scripting and analysis. The ecosystem is characterized as leveraging the broader .NET library landscape while supporting native web frameworks like Giraffe, Saturn, and data science tools such as Deedle and DiffSharp. Community-driven tooling, particularly the FSharp.Compiler.Service and the Ionide VS Code extension, is credited with improving the cross-platform editor experience, though the author observed the community remains smaller than OCaml's. The piece concludes that F# offers a pragmatic, production-ready functional language on a mature platform, with its trajectory supported by renewed corporate investment and consistent community projects like Awesome F# and Amplifying F#.

A March 2023 Reddit discussion on OCaml's limited popularity aggregated long-standing technical and ecosystem criticisms from experienced practitioners. Participants noted the historical QPL license, since changed to LGPL, and the late arrival of solid multicore support as key hindrances to adoption. The language's dual module/object system and its "basic" standard library were cited as creating a steep learning curve and ecosystem fragmentation, exemplified by competing concurrency libraries (Lwt, Async, Eio). Commenters argued OCaml lacks a dominant application niche beyond compiler construction and formal verification, a domain where its algebraic datatypes and pattern matching excel.

Several concrete outcomes were acknowledged: OCaml 5 delivered multicore capabilities, Dune stabilized project management, and VSCode/LSP improved the IDE experience. However, the community consensus indicated these arrived too late to counter momentum toward F# on .NET or Rust for systems programming. The discussion repeatedly highlighted Jane Street as the sole major commercial backer, creating a talent pool concentration but failing to catalyze broader industry use. Windows support was described as historically poor, though recent tools from Tarides were noted as a potential improvement.

The thread concluded that mainstream languages have absorbed many ML-family features, reducing OCaml's marginal benefit for most teams. A recurring observation was that the language's design favors theoretical elegance over pragmatic onboarding, with documentation and tooling breaks cited as community management failures. No single technical flaw was deemed fatal; instead, the aggregate of social, ecosystem, and timing factors was presented as explaining its niche status.

A February 2025 Hacker News discussion of a "Why Clojure?" essay generated over 200 comments debating the language's production viability. Practitioners reported 10+ year codebases with minimal dependency churn and cited REPL-driven development as enabling faster iteration than compile-test-debug cycles. Critics raised hiring difficulties, dynamic typing friction in large codebases, and community fragmentation around tooling (lein vs deps.edn vs boot). Multiple commenters noted teams initially adopting Clojure for greenfield projects, then migrating to Go or Kotlin after key developers departed, attributing abandonment to perceived elitism and tooling complexity rather than technical deficiencies.

A February 2025 Reddit thread generated over 900 upvotes and extensive debate on r/Python. The original post noted that performance-critical Python tooling like the Ruff linter, Polars DataFrame library, and uv package manager are increasingly implemented in Rust, attributing their adoption to order-of-magnitude speed improvements. Commenters debated whether this constitutes Rust "taking over" or simply continuing Python's historical role as a glue language for C/C++ extensions, with many arguing Rust is primarily replacing C/C++ in this niche due to its memory safety and modern tooling. Concrete outcomes include the successful migration of high-profile projects like Pydantic v2 to a Rust core (pydantic-core) and the emergence of a commercial entity, Astral (creators of Ruff and uv), securing venture funding to develop these Rust-based tools. The discussion revealed significant community friction, with critics labeling Rust advocates as overly vocal and expressing concern about ecosystem lock-in and compile-time dependencies, while proponents highlighted tangible gains in developer experience and performance.

A February 2025 Hacker News discussion on The Simplicity of Prolog generated over 120 comments debating the language's limitations and modern viability. Long-time practitioners criticized Prolog's abstraction features, first-class predicate support, and search strategy control, while advocates highlighted elegant problem expression with Constraint Logic Programming (CLP). The discussion revealed a technical schism between SWI-Prolog's "batteries-included" approach (which introduced a non-standard dict syntax breaking backward compatibility) and Scryer Prolog's ISO-focused purity. Commenters cited concrete applications including a GNU Prolog-based Void Linux installer, TerminusDB's codebase, and use in cancer research and government funding models.

A November 2024 community analysis positioned F# as a pragmatic ML-derivative for .NET, emphasizing its clean functional syntax and seamless C# interop as primary advantages. Practitioners noted its type-driven design, Hindley-Milner inference, and computation expressions for streamlining monadic workflows. Critics within the discussion argued that F#'s functional purity is complicated by mandatory .NET OOP interoperability, citing serialization reliance on runtime reflection and constraints requiring inline functions to bypass CLR generic limitations. Concrete outcomes included benchmarked performance parity with Scala on naïve algorithms and tooling praise for VS Code's integrated type display. The debate concluded that F#'s evolution is fundamentally shaped by the .NET ecosystem, with its unique features (type providers, units of measure, and active patterns) offering solutions to specific .NET integration challenges rather than general-purpose FP abstractions.