this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
14 points (93.8% liked)

Programming Languages

1186 readers
1 users here now

Hello!

This is the current Lemmy equivalent of https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/.

The content and rules are the same here as they are over there. Taken directly from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages overview:

This community is dedicated to the theory, design and implementation of programming languages.

Be nice to each other. Flame wars and rants are not welcomed. Please also put some effort into your post.

This isn't the right place to ask questions such as "What language should I use for X", "what language should I learn", and "what's your favorite language". Such questions should be posted in /c/learn_programming or /c/programming.

This is the right place for posts like the following:

See /r/ProgrammingLanguages for specific examples

Related online communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
14
Critique my idea for a language (self.programming_languages)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by tatterdemalion to c/programming_languages
 

I've never felt the urge to make a PL until recently. I've been quite happy with a combination of Rust and Julia for most things, but after learning more about BEAM languages, LEAN4, Zig's comptime, and some newer languages implementing algebraic effects, I think I at least have a compelling set of features I would like to see in a new language. All of these features are inspired by actual problems I have programming today.

I want to make a language that achieves the following (non-exhaustive):

  • significantly faster to compile than Rust
  • at least has better performance than Python
  • processes can be hot-reloaded like on the BEAM
  • most concurrency is implemented via actors and message passing
  • built-in pub/sub buses for broadcast-style communication between actors
  • runtime is highly observable and introspective, providing things like tracing, profiling, and debugging out of the box
  • built-in API versioning semantics with automatic SemVer violation detection and backward compatible deployment strategies
  • can be extended by implementing actors in Rust and communicating via message passing
  • multiple memory management options, including GC and arenas
  • opt-in linear types to enable forced consumption of resources
  • something like Jane Street's Ocaml "modes" for simpler borrow checking without lifetime variables
  • generators / coroutines
  • Zig's comptime that mostly replaces macros
  • algebraic data types and pattern matching
  • more structural than nominal typing; some kind of reflection (via comptime) that makes it easy to do custom data layouts like structure-of-arrays
  • built-in support for multi-dimensional arrays, like Julia, plus first-class support for database-like tables
  • standard library or runtime for distributed systems primitives, like mesh topology, consensus protocols, replication, object storage and caching, etc

I think with this feature set, we would have a pretty awesome language for working in data-driven systems, which seems to be increasingly common today.

One thing I can't decide yet, mostly due to ignorance, is whether it's worth it to implement algebraic effects or monads. I'm pretty convinced that effects, if done well, would be strictly better than monads, but I'm not sure how feasible it is to incorporate effects into a type system without requiring a lot of syntactical overhead. I'm hoping most effects can be inferred.

I'm also nervous that if I add too many static analysis features, compile times will suffer. It's really important to me that compile times are productive.

Anyway, I'm just curious if anyone thinks this would be worth implementing. I know it's totally unbaked, so it's hard to say, but maybe it's already possible to spot issues with the idea, or suggest improvements. Or maybe you already know of a language that solves all of these problems.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tatterdemalion 2 points 9 months ago

Yea I'm not sure exactly how much control of the GC would be possible, but having multiple options seems like a reasonable approach. Languages with RAII usually rely on scoping, reference counting, and arenas, so I would provide those in addition to a more "global" garbage collector.