I don't see why a language can't be one guy's passion project. Even if he releases it and it turns out he's the only person that likes it, so what? It's not like he's had millions in VC or government investment dumped into it or something. He's got some ideas and he's implementing them. I'm interested to see how it turns out.
Golang has had success and was primarily made in private by 3 guys and hasn't strayed too far from the original founding principles they came up with.
Unless it's being designed from committee from the start, most languages start off as a 'passion project.' But, there is a point where they have to bring in more people to handle the work and mitigate the single point of failure.
I think he bought in more people at one point, then sent them away again when he realized he wasn't able to keep the project on track with that many chefs making the soup. The problem with more people is that the project can very easily degenerate into design by committee.
If there's enough actual interest, some group of people will just clone the language in an open manner since enough is known about it. But that doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.
I thought Odin was one of the clone languages at the start (although later it diverged from Jai in many aspects, and is far ahead Jai in the aspect that it's open-source and is actually being used in production).
But really I would like Jai to take some time to mature over the years, instead of rushing out for an immediate public release. It has some very ambitious ideas that would absolutely be killer features, but I think it needs ample time to get polished. (Off to writing C++ code during the time then...)
Odin has similar syntax, but one of the main reasons I am interested in Jai is because it has strong meta-programming support[0], where as Odin doesn't and will likely never due to the author of the language not wanting to go in that direction.
Yeah, I have about the same opinions. Odin made a conscious decision to not invest much in compile-time metaprogramming, and as a result was able to actually ship things without spending too much time on language design. But it’s a bit less ambitious than what Jai was trying to do.
Golang has had success and was primarily made in private by 3 guys and hasn't strayed too far from the original founding principles they came up with.