ActiveState, creator of many enterprise-grade software language tools and the Komodo family of IDEs, has added support for four major new languages.
In addition to editions for Python, Perl, and Tcl, ActiveState will now offer Ruby, Node.js, Google's Go language, and the Lua scripting language in both free community editions and for-pay, professionally supported versions. ActiveState said it chose these four based on customer feedback about what languages they wanted to see supported.
Go and Node.js would seem to be shoo-ins: Go has become a success story by powering products like Docker and being a go-to (pun intended) language for creating network services and compact, portable command-line applications. Its toolchain is inspiring the creation of other language products. Node.js, the server-centric version of JavaScript, has become the center of a software ecosystem that powers far more than web applications alone.
Ruby, via its Ruby on Rails web framework, has enduring popularity in enterprises and helps power the popular the Chef automation system. Lua -- the least-known of the bunch -- is a scripting language akin to Python. Because of its compact runtime, it's eyed as a convenient option to do scripting inside other, larger applications.
ActiveState plans to offer these four languages in the same tiered editions as its other language products: community, business, enterprise, and OEM. The community edition is free, but not licensed for production use, while the business and enterprise editions offer different levels of SLA depending on one's needs. For redistributing the language package with an application -- likely to be the case with Lua -- an OEM licensing option is available and commercial support is an option for that tier.
These open source languages are already available for multiple platforms, but not all have been available for the variety of platforms used in enterprises. Along with versions for Windows, MacOS, and Linux community support, ActiveState offers versions for enterprise-level AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris. (IBM Power systems -- Linux or otherwise -- are not supported.)
Support for other languages is also on the slate. "Don't be surprised if you see more ActiveState language distributions released over the next while," says ActiveState. There are as yet no details about which ones, but a likely possibility is Rust, given the language's expanding ambitions and growing user community.
There are other, even more tantalizing hints: "We will be taking all of our language distributions to the next level in 2017 by introducing enhanced distributions with additional enterprise security features, advanced package management, and more," writes ActiveState.
One move that might be of real value is for ActiveState to create a distribution for a language that doesn't normally have package management -- C or C++, for instance. That could appeal to the enterprise developer crowd and far beyond.