Darklang Goes Open Source
85 comments
·June 16, 2025simonw
eddythompson80
> Any other examples of that? I'm particularly interested in that for this kind of software product.
As far as I know, this pattern is not uncommon among traditional businesses. King Arthur Flour Company is the largest one that comes to my mind, but on a local level; grocery stores, restaurants, mechanic shops, plumbing businesses, etc very often "change ownership" this way.
In software, it's pretty common in informal OSS project to transition ownership this way when the original owner/author loses interest or is otherwise unable to maintain the project.
In terms of commercial sortware, something like SketchUp comes to mind, though it's not exact path. It was a startup, acquired by Google, then spun off again with its employees
qwertox
I wish the owners of Komoot would have done this.
They sold the company because they didn't see a future of growth, and the employees were notified of the sale of the company just a couple of days before.
The new owner then fired most of the employees, it's an Italian "tech company" (Bending Spoons) which already bough companies like Evernote, Brightcove or WeTransfer, and has nothing to do with the outdoors.
Komoot was the best outdoor-community app in Germany and very popular in Europe, made mostly for hiking and biking.
You can see in this really moving video, made by the employees after they got fired, how much they loved their team:
ahartmetz
That seems like an exemplary way to handle a failed rocketship that nevertheless produced something useful to certain customers. Big thumbs up to those who made it happen.
pan69
> an 8 year old product with no traction ... and we agreed that this could best be achieved by selling it to the employees.
Can someone with more business sense than me explain this? Why would employees want to buy an 8 year old product with no traction? At face value this sounds like a "holding the bag" scenario, not?
imadj
They're not buying the product. They're buying the company so they can pivot and implement their vision.
Basically, the investors lost interest but the team is passionate and see a path to success. They won't be maintaining the old product, they're going in new direction.
necubi
It's actually the opposite. They're buying the assets (the software), not the company.
> To ensure continuity for users and fans, as well as to continue building what we regard as an important technology, Dark Inc has sold the assets – the Darklang language, the blog, the hosted service, the Discord, etc, darklang.com, etc – to a new company started by Dark Inc's former employees.
(from https://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-darklang-...)
In other words, there's a new company (Darklang Inc.) that has purchased the assets of Dark Inc. (for probably relatively little money). This clears the cap table, making it easier for the former employees (now founders) to raise money for the new corporation.
VirusNewbie
> investors lost interest
The founder lost interest, he started a new company and he is the CEO of it!
MichaelGlass
Have you ever been to a great restaurant that happened to be on the wrong corner? Or been at a company where one change in execution made or broke the company? My guess: the founder lost interest but the employees still believed in the [impressive] tech. Because of the lack of traction: the cost of the tech wasn't prohibitive for the employees?
eddythompson80
> "holding the bag" scenario, not?
Only if they are buying it for what the investors had already put into it, which is not likely. They most likely discussed how much the investors values physical assets and trademarks the company holds (like how much they are likely to get back in a bankruptcy) plus whatever makes a deal fair and maintain a happy cordial relationship with said investors for future endeavors.
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asim
Corrected by @justincormack. Post was about Docker Inc.
justincormack
Thats not what happened. There was no new company, the company continues to be the same. They didnt sell off the business for money raised.
asim
Really? So it was just a recap?
freedomben
Was previously "source available" but is now Apache 2. Good choice IMHO!
Also looks like it required their cloud setup to run, you previously couldn't run it locally. Now you can, so I think it's moving in the right direction!
sisve
I guess darklang was too far ahead in their thinking in some areas and choose the wrong path for other. I really liked the deployless idea, but would have loved in even more on-premise. No way to get the data to stay in Europe.
Making hard connections between the editor and the lang was interesting also. Seems like they have moved away from that.
Hope there is a easy way to set it up locally, i was really intrigued when they first launched
pbiggar
Yes, the next version will be able to set up locally - you'll be able to install a single Darklang binary and run any darklang program without any further steps. See the explanations on https://darklang.com homepage.
The issue with the hard connection between the editor and language is that each change becomes a massive undertaking. Making a language improvement was much much much simpler than making the editor change to support it.
sisve
It was a bit hard to understand what is coming and what deprecated. As soon as i went into documentation I was send to "darklang classic".
How are the deployless senario now? Where you first serve only yourself then your team, then beta, then everyone... Or something similar to that. I really liked how that story was told and how much complexity it removed
notarobot123
> We're now building Darklang to run locally as a CLI
Dark's structure editor looked promising. I'm really disappointed that the project moved away from this because a hosted visual programming environment felt like the whole value proposition in the first place.
Was it the pivot to AI that killed this, was it issues with the design of the language or was the structure editor just not as useful as it seemed?
pbiggar
Stachu is really interested in bringing back the hosted programming environment in some form fyi. Just need to get the basics working first.
thesurlydev
I've been following Dark since its inception and found the idea inspiring. I'm happy about today's announcements and look forward to seeing what comes next.
On a personal note, I'm curious around the move to F# as the implementing language and wonder if there will be ports to other languages now that it's open source.
jhbadger
F# from OCaml isn't much of a leap, though. F# is basically OCaml modified to fit .NET datatypes.
anonzzzies
I was following this since it started. I dislike modern code experiences because of many of the things, especially devops, they fixed. But it being not fully open source always held us back and we developed our own solution with common lisp and some typing sauce that keeps us free from all the modern dev and deploy crap. Everything runs easily on your laptop as well as in the cloud without any difference and, outside running a simple script to set up some vps or cloud hoster. Happy darklang went apache license and looking forward how their deployment looks now as not self hosting is just never ever an option: all companies become frauds in the end so we need to be able to move any time.
jitl
Epic's new language, Verse, is also well poised for the "immutable" future of AI agent coding. Verse uses an effects system, and the <transacts> effect is required for any function to change a mutable variable. These changes are transactional, so if you have a failure in your <transacts> function, any changes it made are rolled back at exit. Code still looks imperative-ish, but it's both safe and pure.
(Or, it works something like this. The documentation is hard to understand; I'm working mostly on memory from their keynote)
nylonstrung
Verse is totally proprietary and is still tied to the engine. Trust me that it sucks
kburman
I’ve watched the demo video, and gone through the discussion here but I’m still not sure what the core use case for Darklang is. It feels like I'm missing something obvious.
Can someone explain the practical problems this is solving better than existing tools like Python or other backend stacks?
Also, genuine question: how was the team able to work on this for 2+ years without revenue or traction? Was there still funding left, or was this a side project during that time?
rtpg
The theory is that because Dark offers a nice interactive environment when you have a request come in you can inspect the data, "fix up" your code, rerun it quite smoothly. Completely removing the deploy question. Really good for glue projects IMO. Think stuff like google scripts (though google scripts are much more miserable to ues)
Many moons ago I had tried to play with Dark and unfortunately the surrounding language stuff really didn't work out for me though. I really liked the concept but ultimately I think I would have preferred if they had just built out the environment on some other language.
Even just lua would work decently well for their use cases, if paired with a good "standard" library.
The UI was fun to use, in any case.
EDIT: to be clear I'm a bit of a type weenie but for the stuff Dark could be good with you really sometimes just want to look at the JSON and poke at it, and your type systems aren't going to be helping you _that much_
adastra22
I don't understand. Hot code reloading on my dev laptop gets me this kind of quick iteration when I'm solving problems. But why do I want that in production?
rtpg
A user send a request, and gets a response you don't grasp. In Darklang-like envs that request data is held onto for a bit, you can replay it and tweak things. And you don't have to think about environment differences because you're working _in production_.
You could be taking webhook values from some external service that starts passing in unknown values. That service's documentation might just be outright wrong about its behavior. But you don't have to play post-mortem forensics, as you can hold onto information.
This can be valuable for one-offs where you don't mind breakage, with relatively low request coutns and "time to fix" is what you're optimizing rather than general uptime/downtime. So some silly discord bot could work off of this, but you probably don't want your B2B SaaS being in cowboy mode.
Sometimes you want a thing that just does something and you don't care about how busted it is, but you want it to be _very easy_ to fix up issues you do care about.
vanschelven
Because the title at the top links to the blog (not the homepage) I was a bit puzzled as to what Darklang actually _is_. One more click on a similar logo reveals "Darklang puts everything in one box, so you can build CLIs and cloud apps with no bullshit, just code."
LtWorf
It is no more clear to me now than it was before.
latentsea
No bullshit, except the company going out of business.
solomonb
What are the pros and cons of Dark Lang vs Unison?
apgwoz
In theory, Dark and associated infrastructure for running Dark apps is the perfect companion to LLM based vibe coding… I think, and I am just understanding this now. The goals of Darklang were always “no this, no that, not that either.” And so the focus was not on targeting 3rd party stuff of questionable design, but rather a single integrated set of patterns that abstracted the messy bits away.
Turns out, the messy bits are the things that turn your vibe coded Twitter clone into a full time operations job…
https://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-darklang-... includes this, which is a really interesting pattern that I don't remember hearing about before for this kind of company:
> In conversation with our investors and the board, we believed that the best way forward was to shut down the company, as it was clear that an 8 year old product with no traction was not going to attract new investment. In our discussions, we agreed that continuity of the product was in the best interest of the users and the community (and of both founders and investors, who do not enjoy being blamed for shutting down tools they can no longer afford to run), and we agreed that this could best be achieved by selling it to the employees.
Any other examples of that? I'm particularly interested in that for this kind of software product.