candy VS boba

We're using some unstable features (hence nightly), and I just updated our Rust version on Thursday (https://github.com/candy-lang/candy/pull/948) because the previous one (nightly-2023-07-21) was too old for a dependency. So we're not usually using this recent Rust versions.

Thanks for letting us know about the binary size! We previously enabled debug info in release builds to use flamegraphs, but actually don't need it for most builds. I just disabled it (https://github.com/candy-lang/candy/pull/950), and the binary size went down from 177.4 MB to 14.2 MB for me!

The CLI should work, or at least we're using it regularly when working on Candy. Can you please share your OS and the command and output, maybe in a GitHub issue? We definitely need to improve our documentation and the CLI's error handling. Does running `cargo run --release -- run ./packages/Examples/helloWorld.candy` from the repository root work for you?

The VS Code extension also uses the CLI internally since that exposes a language server, so it basically runs `cargo run --release -- lsp`. But we also have to improve the stability here.

Continued working on Candy (https://github.com/candy-lang/Candy).

I've done a small implementation, used in type inference, in my language Boba. And you are correct, I used the linear equation solving method.

The vast majority of October's improvements on Boba were type system and runtime bug fixes. In particular, the effect handler/delimited continuation semantics were hopelessly busted beyond a few simple examples I'd fixated on.

September was another productive month for Boba, which is starting to get more 'quality of life' improvements rather than broad new features. That doesn't make the work less important: one of the bug fixes to the type inference engine last month caught a previously unseen bug in the core Boba libraries!

Also worth checking out is Adam Gundry's work on type inference for UoM types. Or, if you want an example implementation of the Abelian unification used in standard type inference extended with UoM types, you can reference my implementation, based on solving linear equations.

August was a surprisingly productive month for the Boba compiler. A few highlights:

The next large feature for Boba (a general-purpose concatenative language) is language integrated property tests.

That's a good question! I wrote up some of my thoughts on the benefits of Go as a backend, but there's also a historical component here. The first backend I was experimenting with was compile-to-C plus a C-based runtime. Go was closer to C than C# for what I needed at the time and I thought had a nicer concurrency story as a backend.