HVM VS nushell

Reminds me of HVM[0]

[0]https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

Really interesting to see how new lang concepts and refinements keep popping up this last decade, between Vale, Gleam, Hylo, Austral...

Linear types really opened up lots of ways to improve memory management and compilation improvements.

I have a tangential question that is related to this cool new feature.

Warning: the question I ask comes from a part of my brain that is currently melted due to heavy thinking.

Context: I write a fair amount of Clojure, and in Lisps the code itself is a tree. Just like this F# parallel graph type-checker. In Lisps, one would use Macros to perform compile-time computation to accomplish something like this, I think.

More context: Idris2 allows for first class type-driven development, where the types are passed around and used to formally specify program behavior, even down to the value of a particular definition.

Given that this F# feature enables parallel analysis, wouldn't it make sense to do all of our development in a Lisp-like Trie structure where the types are simply part of the program itself, like in Idris2?

Also related, is this similar to how HVM works with their "Interaction nets"?

https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

https://www.idris-lang.org/

https://clojure.org/

I'm afraid I don't even understand what the difference between code, data, and types are anymore... it used to make sense, but these new languages have dissolved those boundaries in my mind, and I am not sure how to build it back up again.

Impressive presentation but I find two things missing in particular:

* GRIN [1] - arguably a breakthrough in FP compilation; there are several implementation based on this

* HVM [2] - parallel optimal reduction. The results are very impressive.

[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-63237-9_19

[2] https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

Purity has nothing to do with memoization. Haskell's semantics never "rewrite under a lambda" (unlike, e.g. HVM). Calling (\_ -> e) () twice will (modulo optimizations) always perform the computation in e twice.

The most recent exploration of this, that I'm aware of is HVM (another intermediate language / runtime), although this one is not actually based on the lambda calculus, but on the interaction calculus.

Then, actually unrelated but worth mentioning: HVM. Finally, something new on the functional front that isn't dependent types!

If you are into functional PL, how about https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM? You could experiment if you could schedule that on a GPU?

In the interest of seeking ways of optimizing my code, I stumbled upon http://www.rntz.net/datafun/ as a means to do incremental computations of fixpoints while avoiding redundant work. And also the idea of automatic parallelism achieved by using Interaction Nets as a model of computation https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM.

These are just three small examples of what this shell written in Rust allows. The features are many and many more, but I'll leave it up to you to discover and enjoy them; I'm currently playing around with it and it's giving me a lot of satisfaction and immediacy, now it has a fixed place among the tools I use when working! The project is Open Source, so if you want to contribute, I invite you, as always, to do so, I leave you the link to the repo here!

Any thoughts on fish as compared to nushell [0]? It's similar to PowerShell in its philosophy and is also written in Rust.

[0] https://github.com/nushell/nushell

> In PowerShell, structured output is the default and it seems to work very well.

PowerShell goes a step beyond JSON, by supporting actual mutable objects. So instead of just passing through structured data, you effectively pass around opaque objects that allow you to go back to earlier pipeline stages, and invoke methods, if I understand correctly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof....

I'm rather fond of wrappers like jc and libxo, and experimental shells like https://www.nushell.sh/. These still focus on passing data, not objects with executable methods. On some level, I find this comfortable: Structured data still feels pretty Unix-like, if that makes sense? If I want actual objects, then it's probably time to fire up Python or Ruby.

Knowing when to switch from a shell script to a full-fledged programming language is important, even if your shell is basically awesome and has good programming features.

Maybe if the "popular" shells, but http://www.nushell.sh/ is looking better and better

Yeah agreed, especially now that PowerShell is available cross-platform.

Nushell[1] also seems like a promising alternative, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.

[1]: https://www.nushell.sh/

I also discovered an existing discussion[1] related to this topic which includes a link[2] to a "helper to call nushell nuon/json/yaml commands from bash/fish/zsh" and a comment[3] that the current nushell dev focus is "on getting the experience inside nushell right and [we] probably won't be able to dedicate design time to get the interface of native Nu commands with an outside POSIX shell right and stable.".

[0] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/note...

[1] "Expose some commands to external world #6554": https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554

[2] https://github.com/cruel-intentions/devshell-files/blob/mast...

[3] https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554#issuecomment-...

I appreciate what projects like Nushell and Murex are trying to address, but having a saner scripting language and passing structured data in pipelines is not worth the drawbacks for me.

For one, Bash scripting is not so bad if you set some sane defaults and use ShellCheck. Sure, it has its quirks, but all languages do. Even so, the same golden rule applies: use a "real" programming language if your problem exceeds a certain level of complexity. This is relative and will depend on your discomfort threshold, but using the right tool for the job is always a good practice. No matter how good the shell language is, I would hesitate to write and maintain a complex project in it.

And for general QoL improvements with interactive use, Zsh is a fine shell, while still being POSIX compatible.

[1]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/blob/main/crates/nu-comma...

[2]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/5027

[3]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/9310

I found nushell (https://www.nushell.sh) to be an impressive replacement "bash" for Windows

In terms of philosophy, think "Powershell but actually intuitive" : Every data is structured but command names are what you expect them to be. I usually don't even need to look at the documentation.

I liked it so much that I also replaced my shell on Linux with it, so I have the same terminal experience across all OSes