passerine VS xvm

It's still a long way from being complete, but I'm working on something like that[0]. Eventual plans are to have good Rust library interop (e.g. bindings to hyper for http) while also being able to compile to Wasm (to run on an erlang-style distributed runtime / the browser). The language is currently interpreted, but one I get typechecking working, I should be able to merge in the Wasm codegen backend I'm working on (with eventual plans for LLVM). Current compiler has zero external dependencies.

Language itself could be described as a mix of OCaml, Scheme, and Lua. Currently working on the hygienic procedural macro system and system injection through algebraic effects.

[0]: https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine

Passerine was the next language i decided to try to fit onto paka, but alas this one too was eventually put aside for the time being.

Tossing my hat in for Passerine [1]. Gorgeous ML inspired syntax. Built for scripting Rust applications.

Dreaming here: Lua is a fantastic scripting language, but the Rust FFI isn’t as ergonomic as it could be. Enter Luster [2], which is basically LuaJIT rewritten in Rust.

Embedding a scripting language in a Rust application gives you tons of power (e.g. scripting Rust structs from Lua [3]), and setting this up isn’t terribly difficult.

[1] https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine

[2]: https://github.com/kyren/luster

[3]: https://git.sr.ht/~ioiojo/kiwi

Seed7 and https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine (and seemingly more as others have suggested) have direct / first-class support of syntax declaration/definition in a homoiconic way, as powerful as LISPs, but feels more "natural" compared to a LISP.

It used to work pretty well only if the core PL makes semicolons programmable, but given the development of effect systems, plus customizable syntax as in https://github.com/ThomasMertes/seed7 and https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine , I'd say, there are much more we can do about it.

git clone https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine

Have a look at the ecstasy library for the language definitions of these types.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Generally, left to right, one character at a time. If you’re looking for example code, here’s a simple hand-built lexer.

Parts of Ecstasy are now implemented in Ecstasy. Here's the Lexer, for example.

Ecstasy

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.

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: