Show HN: Alumina Programming Language

I thought people got along with Rust due to its features and semantics and learned to live with the syntax. Not it being something one would copy. (I'm personally still hoping for a Ratfor/Coffeescript transpiler)

Also, wonder how long it'll take until we see a "Aluminia" fork...

> Unlike Rust, however, Alumina is not memory-safe and it requires manual memory management.

From what I gather, it might be more accurate to say that Alumina has no ownership model. Rust requires manual memory management, but offers the ownership model as a compile-time tool for doing so.

It would actually be pretty interesting to see some experimentation around alternative ownership models.

Awesome!

How difficult was it for you to design a whole programming language?

Do you have a theoretical CS background?

If I want to design my own, would learning Racket and other LISPs help?

I'm interested in formal methods and embedded systems.

To me, there is value in the process and craft. It started as a one year challenge to use only stdlib in all projects, for work and personal code, and became a way of life. Though it may not work for everyone, or all languages, or all skillsets, it was a revealing experience.

In retrospect, it made sense given that in my community we make our own furniture, instruments, tools, foods from whole items. Code seemed like the next logical step. During travels, once there was a man who had a word in his language for this. He said it was an aphorism loosely translatable to "the beauty of struggle". As he explained it, this is the positive benefit gained in return for the time and effort to do something as an act of appreciation of the craft, and how the value in the experience surpasses the debt of time and sweat.

To put it in a more modern and eastern philosphical context, think of it like Kata.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata

Honestly, Tree Sitter is fantastic, I can highly recommend it. By far the most user friendly and powerful parser generator I've worked with. The C API is very nice.

The only two pain point I had is that the `node-types.json` that's generated only contains the names of the nodes, not the numerical IDs. This means that if you have some codegen generating Rust enums is difficult if you want to avoid matching nodes by string.

I wrote https://github.com/tibordp/tree-sitter-visitor for generating visitor traits in Rust for a given grammar. I actually did it a bit differently in the end for Alumina, but it might come useful.