terra VS Halide

Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.

Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).

But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.

Terra is the language you're looking for: https://terralang.org/

Wow, amazing stuff. I love Lua, it was how I learned programming as a kid. Coincidently from the same world as the author. Open Tibia.

The author made a custom client (https://github.com/edubart/otclient) for the game that is still very much in active use by thousands of players. He's a very skilled developer.

Great to see AOT typed Lua, I know of the other solutions: Luau, Teal, TypeScriptToLua, Terra, etc., but this one is my favorite so far.

Love the simple compilation to C (and WASM support via Emscripten). Though Terra's JIT is enticing and good replacement for LuaJIT, this is for embedded systems, it's a good replacement for Lua PUC-Rio.

The World:

- https://luau-lang.org/

- https://terralang.org/

- https://github.com/teal-language/tl

- https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Terra is a language that can also do that, and uses Lua as the metaprogramming language. Types are just Lua values.

But unfortunately, there's a lot of work left kind of half-baked so using the language is a pain... if someone invested a lot of time to make Terra work properly and added some tooling around it, wrote proper docs and so on, it would be a really interesting language.

https://terralang.org/

(I am slightly familiar with a language called Terra (https://terralang.org), which couples C with Lua, where the Lua is basically used as the metaprogramming layer ... sort of like comptime in Zig. And making an SOA data structure is the kind of thing you could do in Lua in Terra. So that was partly the basis for my question).

> why can't the hardware designer do something simple and clean

If it was easy, it would not need firmware in the first place. Firmware is there because people expect certain features and quality of life. See softmodems.

> write some assembly (without abusing the assembler preprocessor...)

You want https://terralang.org/ and not "just C"/"just Assembler" instead ?

If CPU/GPU execution speed is the goal while simultaneously code golfing the source size, https://halide-lang.org/ might have come in handy.

This is a task where Halide https://halide-lang.org/ could really shine! It disconnects logic from scheduling (unrolling, vectorizing, tiling, caching intermediates etc), so every step the author describes in the article is a tunable in halide. halide doesn't appear to have bindings for golang so calling C++ from go might be the only viable option.

Probably would have been much easier to do 15 times in https://halide-lang.org/

The idea behind Halide is that scheduling memory access patterns is critical to performance. But, access patterns being interwoven into arithmetic algorithms makes them difficult to modify separately.

So, in Halide you specify the arithmetic and the schedule separately so you can rapidly iterate on either.

It is not the sorting per-se which was improved here, but sorting (particularly short sequences) on modern CPUs with really the complexity being on the difficulty of predicting what will work quickly on these modern CPUs.

Doing an empirical algorithm search to find which algorithms fit well on modern CPUs/memory systems is pretty common, see e.g. FFTW, ATLAS, https://halide-lang.org/

Halide https://halide-lang.org/

It doesn’t apply in this case, but in general if you really want the best vectorization I would suggest using https://halide-lang.org instead of trying to coerce your compiler.

If we drop the "APL" requirement, wouldn't Halide fit your criteria for the third?