cyclone VS cedro

One of the inspirations for Rust, as I recall, was Cyclone: https://cyclone.thelanguage.org/

Which was/is a "safe" dialect of C; basically C extended with a bunch of the stuff that made it into Rust (algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, etc.) Though its model of safety is not the borrow checker model that Rust has.

Always felt to me like something like Cyclone would be the natural direction for OS development to head in, as it fits better with existing codebases and skillsets.

In any case, I'm happy to see this stuff happening in Rust.

It sounds like they re-invented Cyclone.

https://cyclone.thelanguage.org

Looks like it was a research project and is now abandoned: http://cyclone.thelanguage.org

The borrow checker is Rust's secret sauce. It's the one thing no other language has. (Except Cyclone I think, which is an unmaintained research language.)

Also, lifetimes are not the mechanism by which Rust ensures safety - it's a necessary side-effect of the approach that Rust has taken, and this has nothing to do with the issues that "plague" other languages. Region-based memory management techniques are neither new nor really innovative. https://cyclone.thelanguage.org/, which directly inspired Rust, had them, and the authors gave up working on it because the ergonomics were terrible, as is the case with Rust. Lifetimes are needed for the Rust compiler to reason about what it can reasonably allow at compile time, but it, along with the Borrow Checker (which provides the actual safety net) ensures that whole swathes of valid programs are disallowed because the Rust compiler is not smart enough (and probably never will be) to check that these programs are valid.

I’ve built it for now in a separate branch called “self”:

    git clone -b self https://github.com/Sentido-Labs/cedro.git

Currently, it does not make any difference whether this is one token or more because it is sent to the compiler exactly the same as it came in, but you could write a macro/plugin (src/macros/] that recognized this pattern and inserted a space right before the minus “-” sign.

Hi, when I presented the first release here 8 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28166125) it got interesting comments and today I’ve made a new release with additional features:

- Break out of nested loops: break label; (https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#labe...)

- Notation for array slices: array[start..end] (https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#slic...)

- Loop macros: #foreach { ... #foreach } (https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#loop...)

The possibility of loop macros was discussed in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28166698

At the time I hadn’t figured out how to make it useful without type information, but now it works. The same for the array slice notation: it took me a while to figure out how to make it do something useful without reflection, with a purely syntantical transformation.

Loop macros are useful for the kind of things for which you would use x-macros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Macro), with the advantage that it does not pollute the global namespace with macro names and the body of the macro stays more similar to the final result, which makes big macros easier to read.

Since it runs before the standard C preprocessor it can do things like building up `_Generic` macros as shown in the loop macro vec example: https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/#loop...

Source code (Apache 2.0 license): https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/ or https://github.com/Sentido-Labs/cedro

If pre-processing your code is an acceptable compromise, my Cedro pre-processor has that feature: passing a file through it produces standard C code for your compiler, and it includes a wrapper cedrocc that can be used in Unix/POSIX-style systems like Linux as a drop-in replacement for GCC: https://github.com/Sentido-Labs/cedro/

What I’d like to do is a quick proof-of-concept to see whether whatever instructions are available in my CPU can be leveraged for UTF-8 en-/decoding.

For instance, does it work any better than my C implementation? https://github.com/Sentido-Labs/cedro/blob/master/src/cedro....

Maybe the compiler already compiles that to an optimal SIMD version, I don’t know.