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Comment on Show HN: Teal – a serverless VM and programming languageparent

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Cool project! But what is the killer feature of this language? I'm aware that it's kind of DSL for serverless environment, but a DSL without outstanding features over other languages won't attract much attention IMAO. For instance from the example put on the front page I didn't feel it much cleaner / shorter to write serverless app using this language over Python or Node.js. If it's performance, do you have any numbers to support it?

The killer feature isn't the language; it's the virtual machine abstraction, which lets us stop thinking about the underlying infrastructure and therefore build stuff faster and have simple performance/observability/cost metrics (because the application logic is fully and formally described, rather than spread across many services/infrastructure). Does that explanation make sense?

From a dev point of view, it's this: The ability to take business-logic "units" in Python, and quickly connect them into larger programs/workflows that run on Lambda.

So the language features aren't particularly interesting - it's not meant to replace Python. But it can do things that are hard/awkward using just Python.

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