oh boy -- lot's of work ahead for you folks, best of luck! I'll be watching this project. We do a ton with GCP so when this matures we'll be looking at it more.
Yes lots and lots of work, but we enjoy doing it :)
About ballerina, there are similarities to wing, but at a high level it is focused on simplifying networking whereas Winglang is about simplifying the use of cloud services.
[I'm on the Wing team]
I get what you mean about adoption and maintenance overheads.
On the adoption front, we are aware it takes time for languages to get adopted. We also plan to release the Wing SDK to other languages soon, but the best DX is still provided by using Winglang itself simply because we are not constrained by what other languages support.
The language server is actually the same one for different editors, but we do need to create and maintain different editor extensions. The best supported one at the moment is VSC.
> We also plan to release the Wing SDK to other languages soon
Awesome! I agree that your intended experience is likely to be more curated, but supporting other languages might really help. This is really cool to hear.
Also, I realize I might have phrased it poorly, but I meant exactly that about the language server. Language server once, but each editor needs its own extension. Even the extension wrappers around the language server could quickly eat up a lot of maintenance time because there is no true standard. Open VSX is pretty nice for cross editor extensions, but not too many editors use it, yet.
[I'm on the Wing team]
Wing is still in early days so we can't show very complex use cases yet, but as time passes developer use to build more and more complex things with it.
Our aim is to improve productivity and speed by enabling developers to develop against a local simulator and visualization console, giving them instant feedback and much shorter iteration cycles.
By allowing them to work at a higher abstraction level we aim to reduce complexity, which should also lead to greater productivity.
I hope that in the future, as more developers use Wing, we can show case studies and benchmarks that prove our hypothesis are correct.
But can’t you already do this today with GCP and AWS and more generally a wealth of Docker images and Kub/Knative?
Furthermore, I wonder how you guys plan to encourage users to jump ship from (node/go/Java/.NET) to winglang, all of which have a rich package ecosystem?
[I'm on the Wing team]
The elevator pitch is that there are things we cannot do with existing languages, such as our inflights and their connection to preflights. This is because that if we used an existing language we'd have to support its legacy code and could not impose new limitations that are needed to execute the inflight system well. It doesn't mean that you cannot come close with existing languages, and there are nice projects that do that, it just means that you cannot go all the way.
[I'm on the Wing team]
Thanks for the feedback.
We call it new because it is only a year old, and for programming languages its pretty young. It is just now getting mature enough to be able to build real world applications with. Hope it makes sense
I understand your point, and I sincerely wasn't sniping. Since you took the time to reply, I'll share a little of my reasoning in case you might find it valuable.
I think using a subjective term is meaningless, at least in the context of an introduction. "New" is far too relative, and means something entirely different for one person to the next.
I personally think it makes more sense to provide an objective fact, such as "started in 2022" and let readers determine whether that qualifies as "new" or not.
I wouldn't have mentioned it, and may not have even noticed if it weren't literally the first piece of information presented to me in the repo.
In any case best of luck with the project. It looks very promising and I am excited to see where it goes!
The short answer is that there are things we cannot do with existing languages, such as our inflights and their connection to preflights.
The full version is here: https://www.winglang.io/docs/faq/why-a-language
There is no plan currently to add a two-way sync between the simulator diagram and the code, and there could be technical difficulties to do it since the code is not generated but written by developers (only the JS + TF compilation artifacts are generated). But you are welcome to open an issue about it and it and it will be prioritized if it gets enough votes.
Since Winglang generates CF/TF for the parts of the app that are defined in the language, it should be possible to add these parts to the ones that already exist in the app, but it depends on the app's architecture. One can also convert the existing codebase, or at least the infra part to Wing pretty easily in some cases. If you have a particular use case in mind we'd be happy to talk and see how we can help.
Yes, this is a cloud agnostic language, which is one of the differentiating factors from Pulumi where the code you write is cloud specific. Also, unlike Pulumi, Winglang is not an infrastructure language but can be used for both the infra and application code. Its compiler takes care of the cloud mechanics (IAM policies, networking) that IaC tools like Pulumi and the CDK require you to configure manually. More info here:
My question about how to integrate with existing code is more of a curiosity rather than a specific use case. It seems like adoption will be an uphill battle because you're asking devs to learn a new language AND port all existing infrastructure code to Wing.
One other thought: It would be cool to see Wing shine by demoing a full-blown distributed system. Perhaps with a couple of microservices and some supporting infrastructure.
Hey, I'm part of the Wing team, funny you mention the construct programming model as it comes from the CDK, which is Elad's (Wing's creator) previous project. Wing is also built around this concept.
I will read the article you mentioned, sounds interesting
