fpc VS lumen

Looking at the activity on the Free Pascal compiler[0] compared to some other, non-dead languages like Crystal[1], I would say Pascal isn't dead.

They had a major release to their most popular IDE just a few weeks ago[2].

A lot of these projects built with FP aren't as visible in the HN community, because they related to different hobbyist fields, aren't keystone components in the startup ecosystem etc. But they for sure exist.

[0] https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/activity

Free Pascal has fcl-web which should provide a HTTP/HTTPS client (among other things, it can be used to make web apps), though it comes with libcurl bindings out of the box so you could also use that too. fcl-json provides a JSON parser. FWIW "fcl" means "Free Component Library" which contains various tools (mainly exposed as classes).

The packages[0] directory of FPC contains a lot of stuff that come out of the box with the compiler and they often have an "examples" and/or "tests" directory with code you can check. There is some documentation[1] but sadly FCL is really not that well documented - you just have to check the sources for most things.

Note that this is for Free Pascal itself. Lazarus builds on it (LCL, the "Lazarus Component Library", is built on top of FCL) and adds a bunch of additional components of its own. Though usually for non-GUI stuff you just use the Free Pascal classes, Lazarus has some of its own "wrappers" that integrate with the IDE and the form/object designer. The "weblaz" package (it comes with Lazarus but you need to install it manually from Package -> Install/Uninstall Packages) provides a bunch of components for working with the web (mainly for making web apps), including the "TFPHttpClient" component which can be used to make HTTP requests. As a simple example, if you throw a TMemo (multiline text editor) control in a form, throw a TFPHttpClient component and then doubleclick on the form to edit the code to execute during the form's creation you can type "Memo1.Text:=FPHTTPClient1.Get('https://news.ycombinator.com/');" and it will put the HTML code for this forum in the memo (note that you may also need to add the opensslsockets unit in the uses section at the top of the code). Of course that is a very simple example but if you browse the properties and events of the component in the object inspector as well as the available methods by typing "FPHTTPClient1." and pressing ctrl+space in the code editor you can find most of the other functionality the component provides.

[0] https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/tree/main/pac...

[1] https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/fcl/index.html

We’ve encountered FPC issue #40229 (Wasm32 symbol xxx without index value error) but it is now happily fixed :) Many thanks go to Nikolay Nikolov from FPC team for fixing, and Andrzej Kilijański for preparing a code to easily reproduce the issue.

No sure what you mean with "some sight", but the whole source code can be found here: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/packages/fcl-base/src/csvdocument.pp

In Pascal that is really common, since the files are the modules. You publish your library as one file, and the user can import it by the file name.

I ran wc on FreePascal to search for some. There are a few, but not as many as I expected.

9k file, data structures for the compiler itself: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/./c...

30k file: Pascal parser/scope resolver: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/pac...

And the record:

119k file, Sharepoint API (but it seems to be autogenerated): https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/pac...

As far as libraries go, this is one of my favorites:

23k file, regular expression library: https://github.com/BeRo1985/flre/blob/master/src/FLRE.pas

I searched my own files and found a 197k file to parse HTML entities. But that was an autogenerated trie (one switch/case for each letter)

I wonder if FreePascal is affected

Looks like they ported zlib to Pascal in 1998 and left it pretty much unchanged:

https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/pac...

I agree! That’s actually not a jeer, it’s one of my main criticisms of lisp. You don’t need lists to have lisp. In many respects it works better without them; https://github.com/sctb/lumen proves it, since hash tables and arrays are the fundamental data structure. They have to be, because that’s the only way lumen can run in JS or Lua.

Every time I can’t delete the first element of a list in lisp (I.e. del x[0] in the python sense) I get annoyed with racket.

The reason I look past it is because the benefits are so good that they outweigh the annoyances. I wouldn’t trade it away.

Where h is the raw function for hyperapp, not a macro.

I'd intended to develop my own mini-lisp with the same syntax, but got sidetracked by other projects. Maybe someday I'll get back to it. (Currently, I'm deep in the weeds trying to learn how to write a dependent typed language that compiles to javascript.)

[0]: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

It wasn’t my idea, too. It was Scott Bell’s. I’m not sure if he thought of it or got it from somewhere else, but it’s shockingly effective.

If you want to try it out for yourself, give Lumen a spin: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

> What do you develop with Arc usually?

I try to use Arc for as much as possible. We wrote our TPU monitoring software in it: http://tensorfork.com/tpus

Eventually I became frustrated with Racket's FFI. So I eventually made my own arclike language called elflang: https://github.com/elflang/elf

... which itself is a fork of Lumen (https://github.com/sctb/lumen) by Scott Bell.

The performance is good enough to run a minecraft-style game engine: https://i.imgur.com/iyr0YrB.png which was satisfying.

Nowadays I've been trying to implement Bel, mostly for the challenge of it than for any practical reason.

> I like how the "html" and "css" part was embedded in that "news.arc" file. Do you think that VIM script will highlight and lint the "css" part of an "arc" file?

Nope. https://i.imgur.com/o9aUG6j.png

But it has one very important feature: it can properly highlight atstrings: https://i.imgur.com/wO4f742.png

It's probably hard to tell, but the "@(hexrep border-color*)" would normally be highlighted as if it were a string. Arc has a feature called atstrings, where you can use @foo to reference the enclosing variable "foo". It can also call functions, e.g. "The value of 1 plus 2 is @(+ 1 2)" will become "The value of 1 plus 2 is 3".

Not mine! That was all Scott Bell. It's forked from Lumen: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

But, I did make an interactive tutorial here: https://docs.ycombinator.lol/

If you have any questions about it, I'd be happy to answer. This stuff is pure fun mixed with a shot of professionalism.

For what it's worth, as someone with narcolepsy, I relate quite a lot to your chronic pain. (https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1392213804684038150) For me, it mostly translated into wandering aimlessly from job to job, since I thought no one would have me. I hope that you find your way -- there's nothing wrong at all with taking it slow and spending years on something that takes others a few months. Everyone is different, and it's all about the fun.

You could go the opposite route, and run Lisp in your favorite language. Here's a Lisp in JavaScript and Lua: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

Integration is easy because there's no integration. You can just call whatever functions you'd normally call.

Not at all. I've been thanking Scott for making lumen every thanksgiving for several years now. https://github.com/sctb/lumen

I just close the issue immediately after opening it. :)