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.
[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.
[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
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:
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
Hey, I'm part of the Wing team, Winglang is a general purpose programming language, not a framework, so there are less limitations on how far it can take the development experience. It let's developers work at a higher level of abstraction, is fully extensible and is cloud and provisioning engine agnostic.
It comes with a local cloud simulator, allowing you to get instant feedback and enjoy very short iteration cycles.
It also comes with a visualisation console to interact with the local app and debug and test it.
Hey, I'm part of the Wing team, I see where you're coming from regarding intermingling business logic with infra definitions.
If it makes sense, these infra definitions are the functional part of the infrastructure (declaring that you want a bucket and pre-populating it with objects during deployment for instance). The non-functional parts (encryption, redundancy, others) can be taken care of separately on the platform side
Hey, I'm on the Wing team, yes you are correct, cloud services, like object storage, are indeed first class citizens and you can use them as naturally in Wing as you would use basic data structures or OS services in traditional languages.
The idea behind Wing is that the cloud is the computer that it targets. By having a compiler that sees the entire application, including infra and runtime code, we are able to delegate cloud mechanics (IAM policies, network topologies, etc.) to it instead of leaving these details for developers to take care of and reduce their velocity.
I get where you're coming from about a new language for inflight. We will have support for existing languages in the future, through an SDK, although you will not get all the benefits of the Wing compiler this way.
About #2, we've identified the issue to be the lottie animations. Working on a fix
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.