I love programming languages. Big or small, toy or serious. Myrddin looks interesting, and I could certainly see myself implementing projects like this as I dive deeper into language design and implementation.

That being said, and making no judgements about Myrddin itself...

> It also attempts to strong type checking, generics, type inference, and other features not present in C.

This sounds like C++. C++ as a whole is insanely complex, but it's also an awesome low level language that provides zero-cost abstraction mechanisms. It's really not all that hard to stay inside a sane subset of C++.

If you scroll down further on the linked page, under the section 'Major Features', it start to sound exactly like Rust. Exactly.

Again, I'm not trying to make any judgement about Myrddin by bringing up C++ or Rust. It's joined my bookmarks along with all the other interesting programming language implementations I have come across is the past year. Can't wait to dive into some of them in more detail when I have the spare time.

I'm pretty sure I started out working on this before Rust was widely announced, and certainly before it took it's present shape. It was kind of interesting seeing Rust slowly evolve to where I had was aiming off and/or planned to be as it simplified it's type system, dropped typestate, moved GC into libraries, etc.

> If you scroll down further on the linked page, under the section 'Major Features', it start to sound exactly like Rust. Exactly.

I wouldn't say that. It appears to have a subset of Rust's features, but there is no word on concurrency, and that's definitely where Rust is trying to have an excellent user story. Also, Rust doesn't have global type inference.

Yeah, you got me on that one. I shouldn't have used such a strong word. I just wanted to get across that Rust ticked all those boxes (except for "inferred across the whole program" apparently. I just understood that to mean anywhere, but it must have a more technical meaning that I am ignorant of). Good call on Rust's concurrency being a big part of their story.

> I just understood that to mean anywhere, but it must have a more technical meaning that I am ignorant of)

AFAIK, Rust can infer types within a function, but not the signature of the function itself. On the other hand, Haskell uses Hindley-Milner type inference to infer the types for the whole program (in practice, you'll want to add type signatures anyway, but that's not strictly necessary).

Do people that write languages also have amazing programming capability? In other words wouldn't writing a new language be harder than writing any piece of software?

Not really. Such people merely understand a handful of concepts that come from Computer Science and have enough hubris to attempt such a project. Of course, the better attempts tend to come from better programmers.

Then there's the old joke. A Computer Scientist is someone who can write a computer language. A Gentleman Computer Scientist is one who refrains.

I'm not sure there's much benefit to looking for that kind of correlation (or even causation). But yes, this guy seems to be way smarter than me and that excites me :)