cedro VS terra

I’ve built it for now in a separate branch called “self”:

    git clone -b self https://github.com/Sentido-Labs/cedro.git

Currently, it does not make any difference whether this is one token or more because it is sent to the compiler exactly the same as it came in, but you could write a macro/plugin (src/macros/] that recognized this pattern and inserted a space right before the minus “-” sign.

Hi, when I presented the first release here 8 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28166125) it got interesting comments and today I’ve made a new release with additional features:

- Break out of nested loops: break label; (https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#labe...)

- Notation for array slices: array[start..end] (https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#slic...)

- Loop macros: #foreach { ... #foreach } (https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#loop...)

The possibility of loop macros was discussed in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28166698

At the time I hadn’t figured out how to make it useful without type information, but now it works. The same for the array slice notation: it took me a while to figure out how to make it do something useful without reflection, with a purely syntantical transformation.

Loop macros are useful for the kind of things for which you would use x-macros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Macro), with the advantage that it does not pollute the global namespace with macro names and the body of the macro stays more similar to the final result, which makes big macros easier to read.

Since it runs before the standard C preprocessor it can do things like building up `_Generic` macros as shown in the loop macro vec example: https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#loop...

Source code (Apache 2.0 license): https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/ or https://github.com/Sentido-Labs/cedro

If pre-processing your code is an acceptable compromise, my Cedro pre-processor has that feature: passing a file through it produces standard C code for your compiler, and it includes a wrapper cedrocc that can be used in Unix/POSIX-style systems like Linux as a drop-in replacement for GCC: https://github.com/Sentido-Labs/cedro/

What I’d like to do is a quick proof-of-concept to see whether whatever instructions are available in my CPU can be leveraged for UTF-8 en-/decoding.

For instance, does it work any better than my C implementation? https://github.com/Sentido-Labs/cedro/blob/master/src/cedro....

Maybe the compiler already compiles that to an optimal SIMD version, I don’t know.

Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.

Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).

But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.

Terra is the language you're looking for: https://terralang.org/

Wow, amazing stuff. I love Lua, it was how I learned programming as a kid. Coincidently from the same world as the author. Open Tibia.

The author made a custom client (https://github.com/edubart/otclient) for the game that is still very much in active use by thousands of players. He's a very skilled developer.

Great to see AOT typed Lua, I know of the other solutions: Luau, Teal, TypeScriptToLua, Terra, etc., but this one is my favorite so far.

Love the simple compilation to C (and WASM support via Emscripten). Though Terra's JIT is enticing and good replacement for LuaJIT, this is for embedded systems, it's a good replacement for Lua PUC-Rio.

The World:

- https://luau-lang.org/

- https://terralang.org/

- https://github.com/teal-language/tl

- https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Terra is a language that can also do that, and uses Lua as the metaprogramming language. Types are just Lua values.

But unfortunately, there's a lot of work left kind of half-baked so using the language is a pain... if someone invested a lot of time to make Terra work properly and added some tooling around it, wrote proper docs and so on, it would be a really interesting language.

https://terralang.org/

(I am slightly familiar with a language called Terra (https://terralang.org), which couples C with Lua, where the Lua is basically used as the metaprogramming layer ... sort of like comptime in Zig. And making an SOA data structure is the kind of thing you could do in Lua in Terra. So that was partly the basis for my question).

> why can't the hardware designer do something simple and clean

If it was easy, it would not need firmware in the first place. Firmware is there because people expect certain features and quality of life. See softmodems.

> write some assembly (without abusing the assembler preprocessor...)

You want https://terralang.org/ and not "just C"/"just Assembler" instead ?