letlang VS zigself

That works for any types (except the functional types), and even the generic ones. During code generation, I create structs that implement the Type trait.

As stated on the website ( https://letlang.dev ), Letlang is a general-purpose language.

Author here, the article is more about how Rust and its ecosystem are nice tools for language designers rather than the beauty of Lisp.

The crates listed in that article are the ones I use for my compiler: https://letlang.dev

Lisp was only chosen as a way to demonstrate the power of those crates and Rust features. A kind of way of justifying my choices for Letlang.

It's not "you should do it like this" but "you can do it like this".

"Faster than C", I saw people write C code slower than a Python equivalent. So I have to admit, I don't know what it means for a language to be fast, because it depends on the algorithm being implemented.

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"simpler than Python", what does "simple" mean?

Simple design? Python's design is very complex (take a look at "Crimes with Python's pattern matching" < https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/python-abc/ > for example), on the other hand, assembly languages, or Lisp, or Forth, have a very simple design.

Simple as in "easy to use"? Rust is easy, write code, fix what the compiler tells you you did wrong. Joke aside, Go is quite easy to use and while I personally don't like this language, I get why it replaced Python in a lot of use cases.

Also, once you get used to the OTP framework, Erlang/Elixir/Gleam/any beam language are quite easy to use and have less footguns than Python.

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"safer than Rust" is too vague. Is it memory safety? type safety? thread safety? cosmic ray safety? A mix of all of that?

Let's guess you meant "memory safety". All languages with a Garbage Collector are "memory safe".

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On a semi-unrelated note, I've been working on https://letlang.dev

It's a language inspired by Erlang/Elixir (same concurrency model) that compiles to Rust code (the runtime use tokio). It is immutable, have no Garbage Collector thanks to Rust semantics, and dynamically typed.

I haven't run any benchmark (it's not even finished, I've been working on the specification before continuing the implementation), but I guess it could be slower than a rock.

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For some recommendations, have you looked at Zig? Nim? Hare?

  https://ziglang.org/

In my language (Letlang), I use the keyword class with structural pattern matching and optionally a predicate. Types (or rather, classes) can be combined with logical operators &, |, !:

Not sure this is what GP is talking about but to implement the actor model in https://letlang.dev I use tokio.

In the early drafts of Letlang, I had the goal to add an equation solver. I got rid of that because:

I'm working on a programming language inspired by erlang and which compiles to Rust: https://letlang.dev

For a contract based language and a "really dynamically typed language", I'm working on https://letlang.dev

And it's because I haven't thought yet about how to do static type checking with such a feature.

I haven't got any time to work on it in the past few weeks, and I'm the only dev (would really love some help). So, it will be ready when it will be ready :P

I use Rust generators to implement them, a rudimentary example: https://github.com/linkdd/letlang/blob/main/letlang_runtime/src/utils/entrypoint.rs

I don't know about "daily" right now (I've had to take a break due to obligations), but I'm working on a modern implementation of the Self programming language with actor capabilities: https://github.com/sin-ack/zigself

It's nowhere near usable yet, but Zig has been a joy to work with for over a year, and I can definitely see myself using it for a big piece of software.

> Creating a language with the feel of a lisp, the environment of Smalltalk, and the concurrency of Erlang has been my dream for a long time.

I'm trying to eventually accomplish something like this: https://github.com/sin-ack/zigself

It's an implementation of the Self programming language in Zig, with an actor model inspired by Erlang.

The main thing to realize is that Lisp and Smalltalk are very much symmetrical in terms of structure. There is no real distinction between the two other than syntax and basic computation unit (closures vs. objects). And even closures can be used as objects and vice versa.

That only leaves the concurrency model. I have a basic implementation of actors using objects as the "context". It still has a long way to go to reach the supervisor tree model of Erlang, but interestingly enough, the ideas in the article are reflected here heavily; behaviorism is at the core of Self.