Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#11

Post by deckar01 » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

politician wrote: post #3

polymathist wrote: post #2

Author here. I've been working on Fo part time for 4 months. Feel free to ask me anything.

What does the implementation look like under the hood? What are the limitations of your approach (i.e. generic interfaces) and are they fundamental or just on the todo list?

Here are a couple diffs that leave out the copied code:

https://github.com/albrow/fo/compare/faf3c9f96a8ecd9d17ca968...

https://github.com/albrow/fo/compare/f76c531f839e5e76e5f6b7f...

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#12

Post by webkike » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

politician wrote: post #3

polymathist wrote: post #2

Author here. I've been working on Fo part time for 4 months. Feel free to ask me anything.

What does the implementation look like under the hood? What are the limitations of your approach (i.e. generic interfaces) and are they fundamental or just on the todo list?

It's very likely monomorphizing the types, i.e. creating a unique type for each generic invocation.

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#13

Post by tonyedgecombe » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

Interesting, now all you need to do is add exceptions :)

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#14

Post by gtt » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

I liked certain aspects of Go, but lack of generics was a deal-breaker for me. You approached it a way better than I (and many others) did. Instead of arguing on forums you started writing code.

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#15

Post by jcelerier » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

but go already has generics https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#16

Post by jitl » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #13

Interesting, now all you need to do is add exceptions :)

Golang already has an exceptions-equivalent construct in the shape of panic() and recover(): https://blog.golang.org/defer-panic-and-recover

You’re free to write exception-full code using those constructs, although the community tends to use error return values for the most part.

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#17

Post by weberc2 » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

This is suuuper cool. I've thought of doing something similar for a while, but I tried approaching it from the "generate Go" angle. I also found the Go syntax too tedious to write a parser for (because I've never written a parser before, nor any kind of compiler, so the learning curve was too steep). So I was just going to try to build a simple, expression-based language that compiled to (and interoped with) Go. Unfortunately, I ran out of steam because the learning curve was so steep.

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#18

Post by oldgun » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #13

Interesting, now all you need to do is add exceptions :)

... and class inheritance, namespaces, smart pointers, move semantics, std::initializer_list, etc.. :)

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#19

Post by en4bz » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

sagichmal wrote: post #4

C++ style (compiler) or Java style (boxing) implementation?

Looks more like C style macro token pasting with sugar.

Re: Show HN: Fo: An experimental language which adds generics on top of Go

#20

Post by weberc2 » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

polymathist wrote: post #2

Author here. I've been working on Fo part time for 4 months. Feel free to ask me anything.

Any plans to add formal sum types (as opposed to interface hacks)?