pika | xvm | |
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4 | 110 | |
35 | 192 | |
- | 1.6% | |
7.1 | 9.8 | |
30 days ago | 4 days ago | |
Rust | Java | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
pika
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September 2021 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
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.
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May 2021 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
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.
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March 2021 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
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.
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February 2021 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
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:
xvm
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Implementing arrays (and hash tables and ..) in a minimal ML with a C API
Have a look at the ecstasy library for the language definitions of these types.
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Polymorphic static members
2) Funky interfaces: This is an Ecstasy interface that declares abstract static members (e.g. functions), which can then be implemented on any class and overridden on any sub-class, such that they can be invoked by type (instead of this), and virtually resolved (late bound at runtime) based on the type known at compile time. The best known example, of course, is Hashable, because it has to guarantee that a type implements both equals() and hashCode() on the same class, and the implementation is tied to the type, and not to the this. (C# added a similar feature last year in version 11.)
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How do you parse function calls?
I'm just going to warn you in advance that invocation is one of the hardest things in the compiler to make easy. In other words, the nicer your language's "developer experience" is around invocation, the more hell you're going to have to go through to get there. The AST nodes for Name( (NameExpression) and Invoke( (InvocationExpression) alone are 7kloc in the Ecstasy implementation, for example -- but the result is well worth it.
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What are some important differences between the popular versions of OOP (e.g. Java, Python) vs. the purist's versions of OOP (e.g. Smalltalk)?
Ecstasy uses message passing automatically behind the scenes for asynchronous calls, but the message passing isn't visible at the language level (i.e. there is no "message object" or something like that visible). Basically, all Ecstasy code is executing on a fiber inside a service, and services are all running concurrently, so from any service realm to any service realm, the communication is by message.
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Is your language solving a real world problem?
Regarding Ecstasy, we did not set out to build a new language; we actually set out to solve a real world problem. Specifically, we wanted to be able to dramatically improve the density of workloads in data centers, by at least two orders of magnitude in the case of lightly used applications. Our initial goal was to create a runtime design that would support 10,000 stateful application instances on a single server. Let's call it the "a10k" problem 🤣 ... a tribute to the c10k problem from 1999. We refer to our goal as "zero carbon compute", i.e. we want to push the power and hardware cost for an application to as close to zero as possible; you can't reach zero, but you can get close. If we succeed, we will help reduce the electricity used in data centers over the next few decades by a significant percentage.
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How do you tokenize multi char tokens.
Generally, left to right, one character at a time. If you’re looking for example code, here’s a simple hand-built lexer.
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Have you written your own language in itself yet?
Parts of Ecstasy are now implemented in Ecstasy. Here's the Lexer, for example.
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Top programming languages created in the 2010's on GitHub by stars
Ecstasy
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What languages have been created *specifically* for the purpose of being JIT-compiled?
Ecstasy and the xvm were designed assuming an adaptive runtime compiler (similar in concept to the Hotspot compiler for Java), but not necessarily using a JIT.
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What are you doing about async programming models? Best? Worst? Strengths? Weaknesses?
A Future reference has the various capabilities that you'd imagine, taking lambdas for thenDo(), whenComplete(), etc. The reference, in the above example, is a local variable, so you just obtain it using the C-style & operator:
What are some alternatives?
konna - A fast functional language based on two level type theory
seed7 - Source code of Seed7
durin - the Dependent Unboxed higher-oRder Intermediate Notation
list-exp - Regular expression-like syntax for list operations [Moved to: https://github.com/phenax/elxr]
bluebird - A work-in-progess programming language modeled after Ada and C++
kuroko - Dialect of Python with explicit variable declaration and block scoping, with a lightweight and easy-to-embed bytecode compiler and interpreter.
rumi - The rumi compiler
TablaM - The practical relational programing language for data-oriented applications
starlight - JS engine in Rust
ghc - Mirror of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. Please submit issues and patches to GHC's Gitlab instance (https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc). First time contributors are encouraged to get started with the newcomers info (https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/contributing).
c3c - Compiler for the C3 language
RustScript2 - RustScript is a functional scripting language with as much relation to Rust as Javascript has to Java.