Motoko, the native language of the internet computer, celebrates its second anniversary

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Since inception, many Computer Internet initiatives would have adopted Motoko For the development.

Here is a quick update on that language and where they are currently.

Two years ago, the Internet Computer team confirmed the launch of Motoko, an actor-based programming language “made for the Internet Computer”.

Much has happened since then – most notably, the Internet computer “finally underwent Genesis and was launched”.

As stated in the update:

“Since then, many projects have adopted Motoko for development and are running on Internet Computer, with some 400 repositories on GitHub. Projects and repositories are getting more and more technically complex, with dapps and open internet services using different cartridges where the main “business logic” is written in Motoko, but a data store or associated token can be used. implemented in Rust.

In this way, they see “increasingly dynamic systems activated by WebAssembly“, revealed the update.

The Motoko team has also “not been inactive over the past year,” the update noted while adding that it was working on improving Motoko, “both the language and its implementation. work, and to make it more easily available and accessible “.

Opening

As noted in a blog post, the most important step for the Motoko team was that the language and its libraries were open source.

The ad added:

“We’ve been working in this direction for a long time, but various technical and organizational blockers (such as the test infrastructure) had to be resolved before this could finally happen. Motoko and its base library are now public on GitHub, including all sources and the full history of issues and commits, open to external contributors.

The update further noted:

“Maybe even more visibly,” said the Motoko Playground. By allowing users to deploy and test cartridges through a simple web page, it greatly reduces the barrier to entry for playing with Motoko language and the Internet computer. Within the Motoko team, we use the Playground all the time to try out simple things in a full Motoko + IC environment.

Vessel, the package manager for Motoko, has also become a “central part” of the Motoko ecosystem and allows developers to “pull third party libraries into their projects or make their own libraries available to other projects.” , explained the update. .

In addition, many improvements and additions have been made to the Motoko documentation, although there is of course “more to do”. The documentation is also currently open source, and the team welcomes contributions from the community, “in the form of suggestions for improvement or actual material,” the announcement confirmed.

Memory

As noted in the blog post, the most critical project for the team at the moment is to “make Motoko’s memory use more scalable”.

As noted in the update, Motoko is a managed language, “which means programmers no longer have to worry about the essential and error-prone details of memory management.”

The blog post also mentions that this is achieved by “a garbage collector, a piece of code added by the Motoko compiler that finds out when data is no longer needed and the space it uses can be reclaimed.”

Garbage collectors are used in “all high-level programming languages, and their state of the art has reached a level of sophistication that exceeds most manual attempts at memory management,” the update explains.

The announcement concluded:

“Of course, a language is not worth much without its community. We were delighted with the positive feedback we received for the language, as well as the constructive criticism and suggestions for improvements. Please be patient with us if some things take a long time. We would like to take this opportunity to invite the community to contribute to Motoko, its libraries, documentation and ecosystem.

You can check out the full announcement here.

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