sligh VS lobster

But, you still seem hung up on this, so here’s actual code: https://github.com/amw-zero/sligh/blob/main/lib/codegen.ml.

Of course. Here was the first incarnation: https://github.com/amw-zero/sligh. It has a decent overview of the idea in the readme. To sum it up here, the idea is: have a language built around model-driven development and model-based testing, where you write a simple model of an application, and the implementation and model-based tests are compiled for you. I wrote about the overall model-based testing strategy here. This idea comes from self-certifying compilers that produce proofs of their correctness such as Cogent, but we drop the formality requirement and use property-based testing to compare the implementation and model.

Honorable mention - I’m working on a language with similar goals: Sligh, and I’ve written about why I think it’s such a compelling idea before as well too.

In Sligh, I spent most of the last month introducing a new intermediate representation to make tier splitting (choosing if code should live on the client or server) easier. My goal was to enable derived data, as in a model that queries other models for its data and combines them by processing them in memory. I've been using the example of a personal finance application, so imagine:

The language that I work on is Sligh, and it's out of the bulleted list because it's nowhere near as mature as any of those that I listed, and I'm more of a verification enthusiast vs. expert. Almost all of the ideas in it are borrowed from somewhere else, but I think the one quasi-unique idea is it allows you to write a pure logical description / specification of an application, and it generates full-stack web application code from that.

I’m currently using Pest, though I wouldn’t exactly recommend my compiler as a ‘good example’ just yet because I’m prototyping and just churning code out.

Sligh

So tactically it’s currently a source-to-source compiler, where in the source language (my language) you denote the system state transitions, i.e. by writing create!, update!, etc, and those get compiled to corresponding client and server code in the target language (JS for now, but hoping to support WebAssembly in the future). Heres an example program. The compiler source is there too. I’m hacking it together right now, so it’s not my finest work :D

I think lobster does this.

"Compile time reference counting / lifetime analysis / borrow checker."[1]

"Reference Counting with cycle detection at exit, 95% of reference count ops removed at compile time thanks to lifetime analysis."[1]

[1] https://strlen.com/lobster/

There is another language, Lobster, that uses lifetime analysis like Rust, but IIUC infers lifetimes completely automatically. It looks like the idea is still experimental - I'm interested to see how it goes.

I think the ability to open a window and do graphical stuff is actually pretty underrated in core language functionality. There's a few game-oriented programming languages like Lobster that put windowing and graphics in the core language functionality, and I think it's pretty neat. The biggest downside is that it's a lot to bite off, because you'll probably want to have standardized API functionality for a whole host of things like font rendering, image loading, etc.

The actual game itself, yes. Based on this open source project though which provides the language its written in and core engine tech: https://github.com/aardappel/lobster

I'm keeping an eye on Lobster though. It fixes most of Python's problems. It's way faster, has proper static typing, the import system is sane, etc.

Lobster (https://strlen.com/lobster/) appears to at least do lifetime analysis to reduce refcounting. I'm not sure about automatic interior mutability. I feel like there's a keyword here that can help find other compilers with similar features.

Also, can I introduce you to https://strlen.com/lobster/, a garbage collected language made for game development by (and primarily for) the one and only Wouter "aardappel" van Oortmerssen?

I would like to make it work to some degree like Rust with a borrow checker, and have optional static typing (with type inference wherever it can). Other sources of inspiration, lobster lang, and dart. It is going to (eventually...) compile to several places like dart (browser, iOS, android, linux, etc.). After I've created the AST, I've gone straight to code generation, because that's the easy part IME. But now have to insert the "middle" and do typechecking/borrowchecking/inference/other checking. This is for an imperative-style language.

Over the ~12 years of Lobster (https://strlen.com/lobster/) 's existence, features that were removed (in this order): * Lexical scoping. * Icon style backtracking. * Small-talk like syntax. * Dynamic Typing. * Multimethods. * Frame based state (like FRP). * Co-routines.