Mint is a new programming language that focuses on the front-end web, specifically, it aims its focus on Single Page Applications (SPAs). According to its documentation, Mint was created the same way many great ideas are: out of frustration with JavaScript.
One of its main aims is to create safe, maintainable, fast, readable code, in comparison to JavaScript’s error-prone complexity and design flaws.
View its source code and repository on GitHub. The latest version is currently 0.7.1 and the project is currently undergoing development.
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Mint’s key features
What separates Mint from other languages? A few of its notable features include:
- Use CSS to style elements using
styleblocks. - Contain and manage data with a globally accessible
store. - You can add a third party CSS library to a Mint app with just a few lines of code and then use the library in your Mint project.
- Includes embedded features of the JS stack such as React, Redux, Prettier, npm, Jest, and Enzyme.
- Functions are called
funinstead offunction. (View the language creator’s reasoning for this choice.) - Instead of using a library, routing is a built-in language feature. Define routes in a
routesblock.
Sample code. Source.
Mint features JavaScript interoperability and users can inline any and all JS code using back-ticks.
It gives users three ways of interacting with JS code: via inlining, decode expressions, and encode expressions. This allows you to invoke arbitrary JavaScript, convert JS objects to typed values, and convert typed values to JS objects.
- – the documentation is in one place instead of several places
- – the dependencies of a Mint project is usually a few megabytes since everything is included instead of hundreds of megabytes (I have a production app that does not have any dependencies at all)
- – only need to learn one (compact) thing, instead of many complex things (complex since there is no compiler to make it simple)
- – only need to update the code once there is a new version of the language not every time there is a new version of a dependency
- On top of the libraries mentioned the language also includes a formatter, package manager, builder/dev server and testing environment, also for which you would need to add dependencies.
Installing Mint
Test it out with the in-browser sandbox mode, create your own, or browse other users’ sandboxes.
Installing Mint requires a single binary file: mint. (You can also run the Mint dev environment with a Docker container.) Since it is written in Crystal, you will need to install the Crystal programming language if you wish to install from source.
View the getting started guide for a walkthrough on how to create a new project and refer to the documentation and API guide for further reference.
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Alternatives and advantages
User discussions about the language on Reddit and Hacker News revealed some alternatives, including using TypeScript with React or a pre-configured TypeScript-Vue stack. In response to some questions about its potential advantages, the author of Mint wrote on Hacker News:
Author of the language here, I think it is a major advantage for several reasons:
All of these add up to less cognitive load so I can focus on building the product instead of managing the development environment.
Share your opinion with us: Have you tried Mint? How does it fare and is it a viable alternative to JavaScript?
The post Mint programming language is an alternative to JavaScript for writing single page apps appeared first on JAXenter.
Source : JAXenter
