Ballerina: A modern programming language focused on cloud native applications

Description

Companies are increasingly disaggregating their architectures with approaches like microservices, serverless, and APIs to scale. We’ve seen these disaggregated components become network accessible; we call them endpoints. Whether it’s data, apps, APIs, microservices, or serverless functions, everything is becoming a programmable endpoint. The apps we develop today increasingly depend on these endpoints, and these apps can also become programmable endpoints. We need programming languages with much higher-level, network-aware abstractions to model such applications. Ballerina is a strongly typed, concurrent general-purpose language optimized for integration and writing network services and applications. It combines fundamental concepts and tools of distributed systems with direct support for network services, distributed transactions, reliable messaging, stream processing, security, and workflows. It’s intended for commercial adoption and provides familiarity for users of Java, C#, and JavaScript.

While it looks like Java and other popular languages in some ways, it’s very different in fundamental ways. Sameera Jayasoma explores how Ballerina is different, why it’s different, and how those differences give Ballerina an unfair advantage when it comes to writing resilient, performant, and secure network services and applications.