koka VS hylo

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.

Or Val[0], now called Hylo (for a good reason), or V[1].

[0] https://www.hylo-lang.org

The evolution of C++ has been a multi-decade history of dealing with difficult reality.

I have great hope that Herb can create with his cppfront project “The Very Best of C++” to carry that tremendous legacy forward.

If I was to throw my hat into a “C++ successor”, it would be https://www.hylo-lang.org/ with its “all the safeties” and “tell you when you’re doing it sub-optimal” approach.

Paper: https://2023.splashcon.org/details/iwaco-2023-papers/5/Borro...

> Hylo is a language for high-level systems programming that promises safety without loss of efficiency. It is based on mutable value semantics, a discipline that emphasizes the independence of values to support local reasoning. The result—in contrast with approaches based on sophisticated aliasing restrictions—is an efficient, expressive language with a simple type system and no need for lifetime annotations.

> Safety guarantees in Hylo programs are verified by an abstract interpreter processing an intermediate representation, Hylo IR, that models lifetime properties with ghost instructions. Further, lifetime constraints are used to eliminate unnecessary memory allocations predictably.

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

https://github.com/Hylo-lang/Hylo

A model without lifetimes is also being explored in other languages, e.g. in Hylo. It sacrifices expressiveness, but on the other hand you don't have to deal with explicit lifetimes!

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/

Get rid of references at the cost of some expressivity (see Hylo, formerly Val)