#2393 Far Encounters of the Third Kind: Fantom (Real World)

dc0d Thu 22 Jan 2015

What is Fantom's status in real world? Users, projects, code bases, libraries, communities? (Especially those ones related to JavaScript)

For example has anybody used Fantom to develop Node.js apps?

Background: I'm interested in Fantom in browser (as an alternative to JavaScript).

So far the only acceptable JavaScript (inside a browser) I've found is JavaScript!

TypeScript is nice in the way that's a super-set of JS (so JS code is valid TS code). I do not like Dart. These two has big fellas back them and pack them up. That's a factor sometimes - more than sometimes; whatever.

I like ClojureScript very much, but Lisp syntax was/is/will-be a bizarre strange syntax and it's hard to find anybody who likes to write ClojureScript/Lisp - if your project is getting big. And Opa, haXe, ... I do not get them much.

So I liked very much to see if anybody is using Fantom with JavaScript happily!

Me: programming ~24 years from high-school; F#, Python, +10 C#er; mostly back-end & middle-ware; currently Gopher (Go/golang) noob and I have no idea what the hell is going on!

Best;

brian Fri 23 Jan 2015

For example has anybody used Fantom to develop Node.js apps?

If you write server side code in Fantom, then I would imagine running on the JVM is going to be way faster than Node.js. We run all our server code using the JVM and I believe its really the best server side platform in terms of maturity, stability, and performance.

So far the only acceptable JavaScript (inside a browser) I've found is JavaScript!

Its a pretty great browser platform. I can't image writing a huge client codebase in JavaScript directly. For our commercial product, we have a fairly huge code base running Fantom in the browsers. There are a couple things JS doesn't do that you can do on the JVM, but its quite amazing how easily it is to write portable code that runs perfectly both in a browser and server side. We are actually planning to spend quite a big chunk of time making writing UIs in the browser even better this year.

dc0d Sat 24 Jan 2015

Thanks Brian;

My server side would be in Go and I like Fantom (so far) because it's design has some aspects that I like in Go too, and even slightly better (IM"O"): no generics, just int64 and float64 and the like.

I liked to have multiple assignments very much: a, b = b, a. I almost can not live without it.

.NET is an awesome platform as JVM is and Fantom does a great job here by providing a single cross environment code base. But I am not going to use any of those platforms.

I am not reducing Fantom to my convictions; but the thing that is most interesting to me about Fantom, is it's ability to talk JavaScript; because I am going to write some math calculations in JavaScript, inside browser and it's like pure hell to do math in JavaScript!

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