circle VS mdspan

Sean Baxter created a front end c++ compiler by himself, using llvm for the back end and the gcc or clang stl. I think it took him a couple of years. https://www.circle-lang.org/. Before this happened I heard a couple of different people claiming that there would never be a totally new compiler as it was too much work.

The real Typescript for C++ is Circle.

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

Just like Typescript to JavaScript, the syntax is an evolution of what already exists, not a completely different syntax.

Sean Baxter's Circle [1] is arguably the spiritual successor to MOP.

[1] https://www.circle-lang.org/

Context: https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/...

Note that Circle is not an F/OSS compiler as someone pointed out before. This however doesn't make Circle less relevant, because it is actually a testament to show that C++ could have been much better without the claimed breakage. If Circle does provide a number of desirable features and its compiler can be built by a single person, then why shouldn't the committee do the same?

From all wannabe C++ replacements candidates, the only language that is really a TypeScript for C++, is Circle.

For whatever reason, Herb Sutter decided to ignore this language on the presentation.

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

This is the only one with the syntax based on C++, incrementally changing the features via #pragma settings.

"Circle Fixes Defects, Makes C++ Language Safer & More Productive"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7fxeNqSK2k

"Circle Evolves C++"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ZDOGDMNLM

The second someone makes a successor language that seamlessly/directly interops with C++ _AND_ has the level of build/IDE tooling that C++/Rust have, I'm on board.

The closest thing right now is Sean Baxter's "Circle" compiler in "Carbon" mode IMO:

https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/...

Unfortunately, Circle is closed-source and there's no LSP or other tooling to make the authoring experience nice.

I read through the whole of https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/README.md and man, I'm drooling. Awesome work, kudos.

Have a look at Circle from Sean Baxter [0]. It's pretty impressive.

[0]: https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/...

Why not use https://github.com/kokkos/mdspan though ?

It can be the base of whatever *you* write via bindings generators like pybind11. In that sense, the answer to your question is "however you like". For actual simulation code, you'll see a lot more legacy Fortran and C. That said, with things like mdspan maybe being standardized (proposal), efforts towards a standard linear algebra library, and the existence of ubiquitous HPC frameworks already having been written in C++, I would say it's only a matter of time before C++ accounts for an even bigger share of all HPC code.

I'm aware of only two relevant projects myself, I don't know much, came to reddit kind of by chance. One of the multi-dimensional array libraries proposed for potential standardisation, and a gnu machine learning library that was discontinued which could be worked off of. There's probably a lot more out there, but don't get distracted from making something awesome :)

As u/IyeOnline already made the important points about VLAs and std::vector, I would just add that you may find std::mdspan to be a helpful data structure. You can allocate 1d memory and give it a 2d shape of k with nice 2d indexing, eg auto& elem = mymdspan(row, col);.

Kokkos mdspan

The good thing here is that it heavily relies on mdpsan that is a multidimensional view that handle shape and strides. And kokkos provide a C++14 compatible implementation with a complete CUDA support.