c3c VS pika

C3, "The C-like for people who like C" just reached v0.5, marking its feature-stable release: https://c3.handmade.network/blog/p/8824-say_hello_to_c3_0.5

Feature stability ensures that version 0.5 will undergo bug fixes and maintenance separately from the main branch, providing projects with a stable compiler version to work with.

Try it out in the browser https://learn-c3.org

Github: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c

If you appreciate C, then maybe this is a language you'll enjoy. Dive into the documentation at https://c3-lang.org to view examples and read more in depth about the language.

Tuples are being discussed, although I am unsure if it would be sufficiently useful. (Discussion here and here if you want to leave some thoughts)

I've been trying to build c3lang on my local machine. The problem is that it requires static files for both llvm and lld. Now, the static files for llvm have been provided (llvm-static), but not for lld, at least that's what I think. I thought that maybe I've made a mistake somewhere by not search the package thoroughly. I just wanted to know what package will install static files for lld.

So (preferably) have a little look at the language (https://c3-lang.org/) and maybe try it out (https://learn-c3.org/) and then file whatever issue you want: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c/issues/new

Like this: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c

> I wish we had C+: C + a few niceties (and not C ++ everything). There's a whole bunch of newer languages aiming at the space C is sitting in, but with a few additions C could be much more ergonomic without having to invent an entire new language.

I’ve made a pre-processor for C to add some things I miss, although it is currently limited to what can be done without type information and has to keep compatibility with existing C syntax: https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/

There is another language call C3 that “is a C-like language striving to be an evolution of C, rather than a completely new language”: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c

If you have the time, I’d like to hear which things you miss in C. There might be something I did not imagine that could be added to Cedro.

Off the top of my head, cc99 and c3 are two C dialects that both can do this.

I just switched Pika to using significant indentation. This is mostly because of how annoying line continuation is in a ML-style language (so f a b syntax) without significant indentation or required semicolons, but you can read more about the reasons for that decision in this section of the README.

Recently, I've been working on adding garbage collection to Pika. I've successfully written an Immix-based garbage collector that works with the LLVM GC support infrastructure, and I'm currently working on integrating the GC with Pika, or really Durin, the dependently-typed intermediate representation that Pika compiles to. Because types are passed around at runtime, objects of unknown type and size can be stored unboxed in polymorphic data structures; but that makes keeping track of type information for heap allocations somewhat harder, because type information needs to be allocated and constructed at runtime in some cases. It's an interesting design problem, because you want constructing type information to be fast; but the GC will run much more often, so maximizing tracing speed by avoiding e.g. indirection in type information is important; and you also want to construct as much type information as possible at compile time and embed it as constants.

I've been working on adding algebraic effects to Pika during the past month. It's turned out to be harder than I thought it would, but I'm almost done - performing and catching one effect at a time works, and the compilation strategy I'm using now (I reimplemented the whole thing after realizing the strategy I was using wouldn't actually work) should be enough to handle multiple effects at once and also effect polymorphism, I just have to get those working in the elaborator.

After taking a break from Pika, my dependently-typed ML for systems programming, during the month of January, I've started working on it again by getting recursion to work properly. I'm planning on starting to implement algebraic effects next, and an Immix-based garbage collector for boxed values after that. Here's what my current plan for algebraic effects looks like: