schmu VS Forscape

Since the last time I posted, I finished implementing pattern matching for schmu. To make matching on multiple columns less confusing I also added a tuple syntax to the language (finally), which are treated as anonymous records in codegen. Since then, I'm trying to overhaul my memory management, as my RAII-like solution only worked for linear code. In my first big departure from OCaml semantics, I decided to implement mutable value semantics. The paper linked in the Val language introduction makes a strong case for value semantics and after watching a couple of talks by Dave Abrahams, I wanted to try see how it feels. By making mutability be transitive and explicit, it also fixes one of the (few) gripes I have with OCaml that an array can never be really const as it is a reference type (it's possible to enforce constness with modules, but that's not exactly lightweight, syntax wise). Implementing mutable value semantics was pretty straight forward on the typing side, but I'm still not completely done with the codegen. This is due to 1. Assumptions about immutability I made in a lot of places are now wrong, and I had to completely change the way I pass values to functions. 2. I had to implement reference counted arrays, which was more work than I thought it would be. There are still edge-cases coming up in testing from time to time. Yesterday I finally managed it work for tail recursion, yay! I'm looking forward to getting rid of unneeded reference count updates in the future, by moving them to compile time, at least for linear code, lobster style. That's also an excuse to read that Perceus paper again. For the rest of November, I want to enhance my module system a bit. In particular, I want to add signatures and allow locally abstract types. I hope to have this in place before December to do the Advent of Code in my language.

I'm still working on my toy language schmu, an ML-inspired language which uses LLVM as backend.

I spent the time off over the Easter break to write the first program in my language which is not an explicit test and ended up implementing Ray Tracing In One Weekend. It was very rewarding to see how usable the language is already.

And if you like mathematical languages, you should check out Forscape :)

You can use the free GitHub runners to execute regression tests on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I recommend testing with 32bit compilation as well as 64bit- it has a way of smoking out bugs. You could take a look at the GitHub actions on my Forscape repo in the .github folder, although it's probably not the most idiomatic runner scripting, but it is a C++ project like yours.

When I was developing a typesetting text editor for Forscape, I struggled to get traction until stumbling on the following plan: 1) Implement the document data structure and get it rendering to the screen 2) Support non-mutating interactions, such as clicking to move the text cursor, selecting, copying, etcetera 3) Support mutating interactions, such as keyboard input, deleting, and pasting. You'll probably use the Command pattern to support undo/redo of mutations

The project is Forscape, although the language part is made a bit complicated because a goal of the project is creating an editor that supports typeset code with IDE interaction

Finally adding multi-file support to Forscape. The frontend UI aspects are completed and I'm quite happy with the result. The app is Unicode heavy and QString's UTF-16 encoding is an annoyance; I would much prefer if Qt relied on std::string even. But the signal/slot mechanism lets you achieve some complicated behaviour with minimal complexity, and Qt looks great.

Here's an example from a project. The first step installs Qt, the second step clones my repo on the runner, then a bit more setup with Conan, then building and running.

I've been working on the Key CAS project (Imgur Screenshot), CAS being an acronym for Computer Algebra System, and "Key" a judiciously chosen title. This was my third time attempting CAS- this iteration was a huge improvement, but I still find it to be a damn hard problem. The GUI comes from the open source project Forscape, a scientific computing environment written in C++.

It gets fun when you go beyond flat symbols and start supporting 2D notation, like fractions and matrices. Probably not worth the hassle for most things, but I think it makes matrix expressions more compact with better readability.

I've been working on a mathematical programming language, Forscape. Currently it's entirely numerical, but I'm building a CAS separately which I hope to use in the language.

Forscape is a scientific computing language in development. It supports first-class matrices and common matrix operations. The language reached a milestone when it achieved similar performance to other prominent scientific langs on a computationally involved numerical problem from my graduate school years. At this point, I am unsure where the development should go next and I would appreciate advice. What do you find missing in scientific computing languages? What are essential features that you need/enjoy?