konna VS pika

The second was called Konna. AFAIK it’s Finnish for “frog”, but sources seem to disagree? I don’t speak Finnish, I got the word from a Finnish video game. My third and current language is called Peridot. I’m pretty proud of this name, although it’s less searchable than the previous ones. The origin is pretty simple, I was just looking around at gemstones and thought peridot looked neat.

Continuing work on Konna. I recently finished implementing dependent pattern matching, a pretty big feature! I figured now is the time to do some refactoring and rewriting - the elaborator is the first thing on my list. Once all this maintenance work is done I'll be implementing features like implicit arguments, overloading, and pattern matching on code values.

Github repo: https://github.com/eashanhatti/konna

Continuing work on my functional language Konna. The structured editor has progressed a whole lot recently - the most glaring bugs have been fixed and you can work with the entire language in it. The language itself is going well too, I'm currently thinking through:

Working on a rewrite of Konna (formerly Clamn). After using Rust for a little over a year in the original implementation, I decided I wasn't enjoying it. I'm using Haskell for the rewrite - I'd always wanted to write a big project in Haskell anyway haha. Definitely enjoying the higher-level conveniences it offers. The rewrite has been underway for about two weeks now, and so far I've got basic dependent types and partial evaluation implemented.

Continuing work on my functional systems language Clamn. I'd taken the last few weeks to fix a bunch of performance issues, but now it's finally back to implementing features: record types. I've got dependent types in my lang, which means I can get a bunch of more exciting features for free by implementing records, ADTs for instance.

I just switched Pika to using significant indentation. This is mostly because of how annoying line continuation is in a ML-style language (so f a b syntax) without significant indentation or required semicolons, but you can read more about the reasons for that decision in this section of the README.

Recently, I've been working on adding garbage collection to Pika. I've successfully written an Immix-based garbage collector that works with the LLVM GC support infrastructure, and I'm currently working on integrating the GC with Pika, or really Durin, the dependently-typed intermediate representation that Pika compiles to. Because types are passed around at runtime, objects of unknown type and size can be stored unboxed in polymorphic data structures; but that makes keeping track of type information for heap allocations somewhat harder, because type information needs to be allocated and constructed at runtime in some cases. It's an interesting design problem, because you want constructing type information to be fast; but the GC will run much more often, so maximizing tracing speed by avoiding e.g. indirection in type information is important; and you also want to construct as much type information as possible at compile time and embed it as constants.

I've been working on adding algebraic effects to Pika during the past month. It's turned out to be harder than I thought it would, but I'm almost done - performing and catching one effect at a time works, and the compilation strategy I'm using now (I reimplemented the whole thing after realizing the strategy I was using wouldn't actually work) should be enough to handle multiple effects at once and also effect polymorphism, I just have to get those working in the elaborator.

After taking a break from Pika, my dependently-typed ML for systems programming, during the month of January, I've started working on it again by getting recursion to work properly. I'm planning on starting to implement algebraic effects next, and an Immix-based garbage collector for boxed values after that. Here's what my current plan for algebraic effects looks like: