Is this project dead?

[ePaul]

When my engineering team at the company I work for recently discussed which programming language to use for future projects, I brought Ceylon onto the table (other candidates were Kotlin, Scala, Java). But my proposal was "shot down" with the argument that it's only in maintenance mode since 2017.

Looking at the activity here, it actually looks like not much happened after Ceylon was handed over from Red Hat to the Eclipse foundation – so actually it looks like not even maintenance is happening. The IntelliJ plugin doesn't work properly with recent IntelliJ versions either.

While the handover to Eclipse was explained as this way people will see it as more neutral than when it's just backed by Red Hat and "Eclipse Ceylon has a great future at the Eclipse Foundation!", it now looks more like Red Hat didn't want to pay people working on this anymore, and used the handover as an excuse to stop doing so.

Is there actually anyone left maintaining Ceylon and the surrounding projects?

(Sorry if this sounds mean, I don't intend to attack anyone, just trying to find out what's the state.)

[momomo]

lol, by the silence of it i think we got our answer :(

[Voiteh]

Actually I'm trying to make release of 1.4.0 but help of community would be really appreciated...

[momomo]

holy shit votieh, you guys should be more vocal about this. the fact that i've been asking the same question for the past 1.5 years because of refusal to use kotlin because i know this is better but due to lack of answers i decided it was not worth going into, not knowing the project is still active. if it is active then that changes things.

I am not sure what I can do to help, I am not a compiler guy but I can try if you have specifics.

[momomo]

Let us kick up a storm: https://www.reddit.com/r/ceylon/

[Voiteh]

Project is "active-ish". Only by community we may make it active. If You would like to help there is dev channel on gitter where we discuss. https://gitter.im/ceylon/dev . There is still some work to do. We need to find out what actually needs to be included into 1.4.0 release. Language, SDK, intellij, eclipse. There is a load of projects to be handled.

[thinker3]

ceylon is good, but need a rich daddy

[orochi02]

honestly i think it is good that even with how close to death ceylon is, that it is still alive cause from what i heard it has really nice potential and i really am looking forward to future development of ceylon. but i gotta say: people thinking this language is dead, does not really help the community thrive. you gotta make it clear that ceylon is not dead

[msx80]

i'd really love to see Ceylon resume development. I think it's the best language.

[kinegg]

Let Ceylon die, it's a waste of time reviving it at this point. Other languages and frameworks have picked up the good parts a long time ago, while ignoring the bad parts which are now just cruft (like the invasive module system that made interop and tooling a nightmare... this is why Kotlin succeeded in the JVM space: it doesn't suppose a whole non-language environment)

RedHat and the Ceylon team pulled the rug under quite a few community members when they transitioned the project to Eclipse, fully aware that none of the core members would continue working on it since RH pulled funding... without communicating this fact to the community. Instead they did the usual death rattle marketing thing:

We believe that joining the Eclipse Community will help Ceylon become even more popular with contributors and users alike.

... knowing that no core developer would touch the code again, which was actually a bit of a mess and nearly impossible for others to pick up. One or two guys tried, but now they're gone as well. Instead of becoming "even more popular with contributors and users alike", it immediately grinded to a halt.

Ceylon came with some good ideas, but ended up being too complex, too verbose, too anal about modules and with a code base that everybody secretly hated (people were willing to work on it only if funded, and that's a good sign it's not a well driven open source project)

RIP

[momomo]

I don't think there are many languages that can compete as of yet, the generic stuff is just not there in any JVM language I know of. I think the Javascript interop was the biggest mistake and likely time waster. Who the hell writes java, kotlin or ceylon code to compile to JS? Only the most horbid developer would do that. I can not imagine the complexity trying to translate complex stuff, such as sets, generics and what not to Javascript.

If you picked Ceylon as a language / tool, then surely you are top dog anyway. Top dogs would want to be in control and hence write their own Javascript to remain as true and flexible as possible. I am pretty sure of all the ceylon adopters out there, ZERO person ever used it for Javascript, yet that part must have been a major undertaking.

If our company ever becomes rich enough, we'll hire king and fund a new language, but yes, I think this is dead too at this point.

[kinegg]

I don't think there are many languages that can compete as of yet, the generic stuff is just not there in any JVM language I know of

Well the advanced generic capabilities is not terribly important as it's mostly a convenience to standard library writers. Look at Java... it has pretty basic generics but 99.9% of programmers only use a fraction of what they can do, namely pass types to containers. Advanced generics was never enough to win the masses. Again, Kotlin made better pragmatic decisions and their generics implementation solved the problems most people encountered in Java.

[momomo]

I am not most programmers, nor or any programmers that are looking at ceylon instead of kotlin. The java generics and type system is a daily hassle for me, and a major reason as to why certain code can not become easier or more maintainable to read and write.

[kinegg]

Yes, Ceylon was a good fit for a handful of people. Now it's dead.

[msx80]

The best thing on Ceylon is not just generics, but the whole type system. Its parts are great (say type union and intersections, or generics, or top and bottom types, or sequences and class layout in general etc) but the sum of them is so much greater. I think it's a language that really ties together its stuff in an elegant and coincise way. Also i'm a big fan of (the way they used) syntactic sugar, like for tuples or optionals etc. I don't think any other language out there is as good.

It has some drawbacks, as momomo said the Javascript backend was probably used by nobody, it was buggy and came with a lot of unpleasant glue (like the "dynamic" blocks, which are actually my least favourite thing in ceylon) but then again it showcased that multiple backends were possible. I think this is an important feature for a language. For example, an llvm backend was in development in the last days of activity, it would have ment to be able to create native executable on a huge array of platforms. Nowadays it could have meant a wasm backend, and running in the browser the right way (not via js).

The module system is not exacly immediate but not a showstopper either. Ceylon was built with big projects and big teams in mind, not to setup a script or two, so the cost of setting up modules it pretty small in comparison. I agree that it can make interoperation a pain, i experienced it myself.

In the end i'm very sad to see it go, it really ticked all the boxes for me.

[ShalokShalom]

In case Kotlin is not for you, consider Dotty: It is the complete re-implementation of Scala, and is getting released as the official Scala 3.