MoonBit: A Cloud‑Native WebAssembly Programming Language for Cloud and Edge Computing

MoonBit (月兔) is a new programming language created by a Chinese developer team that recently appeared on Hacker News.

Designed specifically for cloud and edge computing, MoonBit provides an end‑to‑end WebAssembly toolchain that integrates development, compilation, testing and deployment, covering language design, compiler, build system, IDE and deployment tools.

Its main advantages include generating significantly smaller WASM files, higher runtime performance, advanced compile‑time performance, and a simple yet practical data‑oriented language design.

The language is led by Zhang Hongbo, who has contributed to OCaml, ReScript and Flow, and aims to build the next‑generation intelligent development platform.

MoonBit is currently in pre‑alpha; an online IDE is available at https://try.moonbitlang.com without any installation.

Example implementations of a Fibonacci function are provided in MoonBit, Go and Rust, with the MoonBit version shown below:

// Moonbit
func fib(num : Int) -> Int {
  fn aux(n, acc1, acc2) {
    match n {
      0 => acc1
      1 => acc2
      _ => aux(n - 1, acc2, acc1 + acc2)
    }
  }
  aux(num, 0, 1)
}

Benchmark results demonstrate MoonBit’s superior performance compared to Go and Rust, as illustrated in the accompanying chart and the detailed benchmark page.

Further information and documentation can be found at https://github.com/moonbitlang/moonbit-docs, with the compiler expected to reach beta status by the end of Q2 2024.