Proposal to refocus the language on Web, IoT and Security while remaining general-purpose

[mcfriend99]

TL;DR

I'm raising a proposal to refocus Blade language and its continued development on built-in support and focus on Web, IoT and secure application development without needing to install any third-party package and without losing it's ability for general-purpose development.

Content

After multiple considerations, I begin to feel that while being a general-purpose language, Blade will benefit a lot more from crafting a niche for itself as a general-purpose batteries-included language with a focus on Web, IoT and secure application development where third-party packages are completely optional.

In order to achieve this, Blade will need to begin to provide tooling to support this goals. This will include at a bare minimum the following tools:

• Built-in testing framework.
• Built-in ORM support.
• Built-in support for more databases.
• Built-in support for media processing (Image, audio, video etc).
• Built-in templating engine.
• Built-in routing library.
• Built-in cryptographic library.
• A more advanced/robust HTTP server implementation (we'll need to go beyond basics and aspire to achieve built-in production grade http server in the http module with support for UDP).
• A more robust http client implementation in the http module.
• Built-in device integrations (such as support for COM/Ports, USB etc).
• Built-in mail library.
• Built-in package management library (it will encourage adoption for Blade).
• Built-in C extension builder/packager.

Just to mention a few.

Along with this proposal, I have proposed some major changes to the Blade distribution.

1. Merge Nyssa into Blade as the built-in package manager.
2. Merge qi into Blade as the built-in testing framework.
3. Merge wire into Blade as the built-in template engine.
4. Merge kite into Blade as the default C extension builder/packager.
5. Merge miniroute as the built-in router.
6. Merge mysql int Blade as the built-in MySQL database integration.

What does this mean for the next release.

This proposal is aimed to start taking effect at version 0.0.86. The next release should be unaffected by this to allow more time for bug-fixes and testing for the proposed mergers.

Who can vote?

Everybody.

How to Vote

To vote on this proposal, kindly drop a comment or a like.

❤️‍🔥 @mcfriend99

[benstigsen]

I support this! I think that Blade is great for web-development, which is personally what I see myself using it for.
Out of all the 6 major changes listed, I think Nyssa being shipped with Blade by default is the most important one.

[mcfriend99]

As v0.0.85 has been released, I've gone ahead to create the project Odyssey to manage the implementation of this proposal. These changes will be implemented in the branch odyssey and all PR for this project should target that branch.