boba
The-Spiral-Language
boba | The-Spiral-Language | |
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9 | 33 | |
48 | 907 | |
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2.3 | 9.7 | |
about 1 year ago | 3 days ago | |
F# | Python | |
MIT License | Mozilla Public License 2.0 |
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boba
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AG unification is the solution for type inference with scientific units
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.
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November 2022 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
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.
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October 2022 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
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!
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Unit Type System
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.
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September 2022 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
August was a surprisingly productive month for the Boba compiler. A few highlights:
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August 2022 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
The next large feature for Boba (a general-purpose concatenative language) is language integrated property tests.
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Soft-launch Boba: a statically-typed concatenative programming language
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.
The-Spiral-Language
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Does This Language Exist?
Try Spiral for a functional response to the system level programming demands. It has an F#, C, and a Python backend.
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How do I get around the lack of MailboxProcessor in Fable?
I did the language server for Spiral using Hopac. It involved turning the entirety of what would have been the sequential compilation pipeline into a promise stream.
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Are there any good resources on reflection in Fable?
Sigh, despite using F# for so long, I've always avoided tackling .NET reflection, but I know from experience (of programming in Spiral) that this is a perfect place to introduce these techniques. Type systems like F#'s really hit their limits when it comes to serializing data across platform and language boundaries, so this is The place to demonstrate the use such methods.
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why isn't functional more popular?
But a language that support programming in a staged functional programming style, like my own Spiral would actually be very suitable for gamedev, I think more than C# itself. It has compiler guarantees for a lot of things that F# doesn't, and what in other languages would require metaprogramming is just regular programming in it.
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Ask HN: How do I get the most benefit out of my programming language?
I originally started work on [Spiral](https://github.com/mrakgr/The-Spiral-Language) back in late 2016 because I wanted a functional language in which I could program novel AI hardware that hadn't existed at the time, and still doesn't, but it won't be long before it arrives. It took 3 years of full time work to get it to its current standard of quality, and I'd really feel comfortable programming new hardware devices in my favored functional style. I've designed Spiral so it is both extremely powerful, easy to use while being efficient enough to program devices like GPUs that can't even use heap allocation for their objects.
I am not really concerned about what I'll do when I get access to Tenstorrent chips in six months; my personal needs for the language are met. But I would like it if I could spread the language more broadly, make it useful for people other than myself and get people to sponsor my work on it.
Here is the value proposition of Spiral.
It is a high-level functional PL that has some features that other languages don't, but that isn't really the point. On mainstream devices like the x86 ones there are a lot of programming languages that are good, and it would be tedious to use Spiral to compile to such platforms compared to using such languages directly. It is a bit how ReasonML compiles to JS. Back when I tried it I found using Typescript easier to deal with. So that is not where I'd like to go into, though using Spiral would have benefits in certain areas.
Rather, while reading the [CNX blog](https://www.cnx-software.com/) I realized that while consumer facing AI chips are not here yet, there is a lot of hardware development in the embedded space. They are heterogenous architecture. They have GPU and TPUs in addition to CPUs. And these cross platform interactions within the same system is something that existing languages are really poor at tackling.
If you look at Python or C#, for example, you can't really program the GPU on them directly. They are CPU focused, and don't have the right semantics and would be too inefficient to program devices like GPUs directly. The way I've designed Spiral is that you can program the CPU and the GPU and whatever else from within the same language.
It is not suitable for just GPUs, check this [demo out](https://github.com/mrakgr/PIM-Programming-In-Spiral-UPMEM-Demo). I recently did a backend for UPMEM devices, which are the first commercialized Process-In-Memory chips. I've posted the link to this on HN yesterday and on the Reddit embedded sub, but I got zero interest. And this is really a pity because that map kernel I've demoed is actually a big deal. Back when I first started working on Spiral, it took me 1.5 years of full time work to get to the point where I could write a program like that in the language. And without backend nesting of the kind that Spiral offers, it is impossible to write those kinds of programs no matter how skilled one is as a programmer.
The kind of backend nesting I've demonstrated is not something you can do in F#, Python or any of the languages that I know of. I could easily create such backends for many kinds of hardware. And people would benefit from that because unlike the mainstream computing devices, the hardware coming down the pipeline will have poor language support, nothing on the level of what Spiral offers. For the kinds of heterogeneous architectures I am envisioning, the language designs that are good in the CPU-dominant era, will simply not be suited in the heterogeneous era.
I need chances to demonstrate how good Spiral is, but I am not sure how to get them. If I do not get them, the future of computing will be a lot worse off. I wasn't there when Cuda was incumbent so I missed the boat on that, but I'd like it if Spiral became dominant on future computing devices. Not because I was the one who made the language, but simply because no other design is as suited for them.
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PIM (Processing-In-Memory) Course
I am not shameless enough to plug Spiral in the main post, but if you are a PIM company or an user of them and want better PL support and tooling, get in touch with me. I'd love to get a chance to play with them.
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September 2022 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
Two months ago I did a ref counted C backend for Spiral so I might as well plug it now. Since then I've gotten tired of 3d art, and decided to just start writing Heaven's Key.
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Callbacks without closures?
I just happened to notice that Spiral has a C code generator now. Maybe you can just use that since it's designed with staging in mind and avoiding heap allocation.
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Multistage Programming / First Class runtime compiler support
Spiral
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Are there examples of programming language compilers that evaluate the side-effect free parts of the program at compile-time?
Another term to search for is partial evaluation. An interesting language that by default evaluates everything at compile time is Spiral, developed by someone frequenting this subreddit.
What are some alternatives?
Forscape - Scientific computing language
lust - A fast, auto-optimizing image server designed for high throughput and caching; Now that is hot.
wort - A core concatenative programming language with variables and first-rank polymorphic type inference
kuroko - Dialect of Python with explicit variable declaration and block scoping, with a lightweight and easy-to-embed bytecode compiler and interpreter.
butter - A tasty language for building efficient software. WIP
gaiman - Gaiman: Text based game engine and programming language
awesome-low-level-programming-languages - A curated list of low level programming languages (i.e. suitable for OS and game programming)
exp-flow - experimental rule-based programming formalism under construction [Moved to: https://github.com/contrast-zone/canon]
xvm - Ecstasy and XVM
cish - Go + Generics + Sum Types
ShnooTalk - ShnooTalk is a new programming language
RustScript2 - RustScript is a functional scripting language with as much relation to Rust as Javascript has to Java.