unison VS Cwerg

Short version: no type classes (yet)

Longer version:

Building upon what Quekid5 mentioned, Unison abilities are an implementation of what is referred to as algebraic effects in programming language literature. They represent capabilities like IO, state, exceptions, etc. They aren't really a replacement for type classes, though in some cases you can shoehorn abilities in where you might otherwise use a type class.

For someone coming from a Haskell background, I think that abilities are closer to a replacement for monad transformers. But in my opinion they are much more ergonomic.

Discusson of type classes comes up a lot. Here is a long-standing GitHub issue: https://github.com/unisonweb/unison/issues/502

For what it's worth, I've written Unison quite a lot over the past few years and while I've missed type classes at times, I think that reading unfamiliar code is easier without them. There's no implicit magic; you can see exactly what is being passed into a function. So far I've been happy with a bit more verbosity for the sake of readability.

I've been following the Unison lang [1] for quite some. Wing seem to set similar goals? From the first glance Wing looks more polished, but there's "The Big Idea" behind Unison - is there something similar?

[1]: https://github.com/unisonweb/unison

in haskell it looks like this, you specify the language extensions you want at the top of the source files: https://github.com/unisonweb/unison/blob/trunk/unison-core/src/Unison/ABT.hs

they adjusted my ticket to be a bug fix on their part.

I think Unison is going in this direction. Imo this is a mistake, as a program language functions not just as specification for the machine, but also as communication between programmers. Allowing the introduction of arbitrary dialects to suit individual preferences seems like it would interfere with that communication.

Perhaps these have already been dealt with and I'm missing critical information. If so, my apologies. Great work, in any case.

[1] https://github.com/robertmuth/Cwerg/tree/master/FrontEnd#dis...

Cwerg has backend that can be used as JIT and is written with readability in mind. Additional documentation can be found here: https://github.com/robertmuth/Cwerg/tree/master/Docs

I defined a basic ISA-like IR for Cwerg. It has unlimited registers and no constraints on immediates.

entire compiler front end ast nodes

I was also going down the path of bike shedding concrete syntax for my language Cwerg before pulling the plug on that effort and just using s-exprs. I managed to make the s-expr quite succinct by carefully choosing the order of arguments so I can omit optional ones. Also very helpful was to use square brackets for list, e.g. (call fun-name [arg1 arg2]). This simplifies parsing a little bit and is easier on the eye. Here are some Code Examples

I am iterating over the languages features for Cwerg's Frontend which aims to be a low level language with about the complexity of C but with some of the comforts of modern languages. I am especially happy with the choice of adding sum types. Relative to C the current feature set looks like this: Removed: * arrays decay to pointers * bitfields * separate compilation (more of a backend issue) * pre-processor * varargs * implcit type conversions * (untagged) unions * ++/-- * comma operator * implicitly nullable pointers * goto