peridot VS xvm

I've mostly finished up a preprint of a research paper on Peridot, my programming language! It still needs some work, but I'm happy enough with it to post it. If you have any questions or suggestions don't hesitate to tell me here. I would love feedback :-)

I'm finishing up with Peridot! The research goals of the project are close to being accomplished, so I'll be wrapping up soon. I'm really satisfied with it as a proof-of-concept for the ideas it implements. The last main bit of the project is a research paper I'm writing which details the language and its applications in detail.

Hey all! I've been working on my programming language Peridot for about six months, and it's finally at the point where I can call it an MVP! Peridot is a language in which the compiler backend is implemented in userspace via metaprogramming.

The Peridot MVP is feature-complete! All that's left to do are bugfixes, after which it will be a real, usable language. Here's the major features, in no particular order:

I'm not aware of any current implementations, but I'll be implementing it in my language, Peridot. Unfortunately that won't be for a few months though.

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.

Hey! I'm Peridot's author. Peridot is a language based on two-level type theory which allows for the compiler backend to be written in userspace. The language is really two languages tied together: a logic language, and a dependently typed functional language. The former is built for metaprogramming - high-level optimizers and compilers can be written that translate the latter language into a target language of choice. An in-depth explanation of the language's rationale can be found here.

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: