Comment by dana321
If you were building a programming language, would you write it in Java or Rust?
If you were building a programming language, would you write it in Java or Rust?
Graal and Truffle make the JVM look attractive, especially for this case!
I'm not personally a fan of Java, but if I was implementing a compiler, I'd pick a language with GC. There's pretty much no downside to a GC in that context, and it gives you more flexibility when working with graph data structures.
If 'building a programming language' means writing an interpreter or VM, then I can see the attraction of Rust for that case. But writing interpreters and VMs is like 0.0001% of the programming that gets done in the world.
In those two alone, Java.
There is no reason I would care about borrow checking implementing a compiler, and besides all the tooling, Java also has stuff like ANTRLR and MPS, and naturally Graal is a good playground for compiler backend tooling.
However in general, I would rather look into OCaml, Haskell, F#, Scala.