koka VS Vale

This post by the Koka-author is an update about what's currently being worked on: https://github.com/koka-lang/koka/discussions/339

Some programming language like JS, use path-based imports, that's not good for making a stabel API.

See https://api-extractor.com/pages/setup/configure_rollup/#:~:text=(The%20API%20Extractor,with%20that%20effort.)

And https://github.com/koka-lang/koka/issues/31#issuecomment-1482200826

It also offers a great Inversion of Control mechanism where everything is customisable, and, unlike Capability Objects, AESs also offer compatibility with type inference (you can pass functions doing IO to map, and it Just Works(TM)) and first-class control over stack frames (because really a continuation function is just some stack frames, which you can manually move to the heap if you want a closure; which means async is an effect!). It also is composable in ways Monads are not.

Koka and other languages implementing Algebraic Effect Systems make everything a user-defined case of coroutines: async is just another effect/Monadic type. Zig does something similar by having first class stack frames, making all function calls possibly asynchronous.

Super interesting, there is a proposal to add this to JavaScript and several languages that use this, unison, koka & eff. I had no idea this was even a thing!

Koka, already cited in this thread, early 2010s. Koka's first claim to fame was a usable effect system (at the type were, basically, effect systems were not usable in practice; in fact few languages have managed to do as well as Koka since). Now its author is working on cool implementation strategies for functional languages as well.

I'm a software engineer with 3 years of professional experience. I worked for 2 years at Microsoft on Azure Compute and now work at Google, working on improving Google search. I am the sole maintainer of the popular open-source library microlens with 80k downloads. I've also contributed to the Koka programming language developed at Microsoft Research.

By implementing all of those optimizations in the Koka programming language, they achieved GC overhead much less and execution time faster than the other languages including OCaml, Haskell, and even C++ in several algorithms and data structures that frequently keep common sub-structures of them, such as red-black trees. For more information, see the latest version of the paper.

Not to be confused with Vale[0].

[0] https://vale.dev/

The article says they created a deterministic hypervisor that runs all pseudorandom behavior from a starting seed to enable perfect re-playability.

But that's all we know so far. I'm assuming there'll be some sort of fuzz testing, and static analysis or some defining actions that your software can perform.

Honestly it sounds a lot like it has a lot of crossover with what the Vale language is trying to solve: https://vale.dev/, but focused on trying to get existing software to that state instead of creating a new language to make new software already be at that state by default.

Why go through all the trouble when you can do this: https://www.hylo-lang.org/ and not spend a second thinking of lifetimes? No, copies will not be issued unless necessary.

Or why not keep exploring this idea as well? More research-oriented than the first one right now, though, so take it with a grain of salt: https://vale.dev/

Another relevant language might be Vale (https://vale.dev), which is aiming for "perfect replayability": https://verdagon.dev/blog/perfect-replayability-prototyped

Interesting. Very low level though and C(++) centric. She there any thoughts on combining the hardware and OS features with rust or https://vale.dev ?

Use a runtime memory management solution that's cheaper than garbage collection (see Vale)

This seems like a tool I'll be using, and this is an almost meaningless criticism, but why the name?

There's already the Vale programming language (https://vale.dev/), but moreover, I don't get the meaning of "vale". You could call it something like Englint which actually hints its purpose.