I also really have great hopes for Swift as a modern, x-platform, general purpose, compiled language. Go is not general purpose; Rust is too low level. Haskell has a too steep learning curve.

Ur/Web is really great, but not at all general purpose.

Why am I hung up over "general purposeness"? Well when I learn a language, it takes quite a bit of my time; then I want to be able to apply it broadly.

Therefor I shun Node.js, Go and Erlang/Elixir.

Julia is general purpose and really fast. You can make desktop and web apps in it.

Ur/Web is for web and thus not general purpose. I can't say if Ur (without web) is fit for general purpose use.

> Go is not general purpose

Can you explain?

There is no arguing with Turing equivalence of Go and most other languages but there are practical limitations which prevent more complete general purposeness.

I like Go since the beginning. However, Go cannot be easily used for kernel development, soft or hard real-time or embedded systems (no linker script support and porting runtime is weighty) and there are few transpilers.

Rust is slightly better, because PoC kernels have been put together with fewer hacks. Haskell, C, Ada, assembly are much more general purpose in terms of being able to build something like seL4, an F-15 cockpit, an engine management system or compiling code as ASIC circuitry. (Perl's supposed use in nuclear armaments notwithstanding.)

PS: I would like to see some geninuses come up with a back-back-end to LLVM or a disassembler which could formally prove binary satisfiability of program correctness without mind-bending, gibberish, over-mathematized, incantations inaccessible to us mere, stupid mortals.

Which language doesn't have "practical limitations"? And it's no doubt more "general purpose" than assembly. How much webdev are you going to do with assembly?

Pointers please to someone working on a kernel in Swift... :)

How is Go not general purpose?

Try to build a mobile app with Go.

How are you then defining general-purpose?

I'd say a language is general-purpose when it has not been tailored to a specific scenario or area of problems, but to work well for most. Isn't that, to a great extent, true for go?

You can build a mobile app in Go, for both Android and iOS.

https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/mobile

I didn't say you can't do it. I said, try to do it. The phrase "general purpose" must be stretched considerably in such a case.

Is there a language you _do_ consider "general purpose"?

Yes. More than one, actually.

Why would you compare it to Dylan? Swift will be the most popular iOS language within 18 months. If you look at the new iOS books that are released, most use Swift. I count over 3 dozen books within 18 months of Swift's release:

http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/books