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Show HN: Alumina Programming Language

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Show HN: Alumina Programming Language

#1

Post by tibordp »

Alumina is a programming language I have been working on for a while. Alumina may be for you if you like the control that C gives you but miss goodies from higher level programming languages.

It is mostly for fun and exercise in language design, I don't have any grand aspirations for it. It is however, by this time, a usable general-purpose language.

Alumina borrows (zing) heavily from Rust, except for its raison d'être (memory safety). Syntax is a blatant rip-off of Rust, but so is the standard library scope and structure.

Alumina bootstrap compiler currently compiles to ugly C, but a self-hosted compiler is early stages that will target LLVM as backend.

If that sounds interesting, give it a try. I appreciate any feedback!

Standard library documentation: https://docs.alumina-lang.net/

Online compiler playground: https://play.alumina-lang.net/

Show HN: Alumina Programming Language
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Re: Show HN: Alumina Programming Language

#3

Post by MontyCarloHall »

I get that this is mostly for fun, but this is as good a place as any to bring up an issue I rarely see discussed with any post about a new language.

Well-established languages have tons of widely used, highly vetted libraries implementing functionality that doesn’t exist in the new language and would be totally impractical for an individual to implement themselves. For example, if I’m doing scientific computing, I need a good linear algebra library like Eigen or Armadillo (or Numpy/PyTorch/Tensorflow), all of which would be impossible for me to implement myself.

Therefore, for a new language to catch on, it needs a good foreign function interface. Yet FFIs are almost never brought up whenever new languages are discussed on HN. (Again, I realize that this is just a fun project and widespread adoption is not a goal.)

Re: Show HN: Alumina Programming Language

#4

Post by tibordp »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #3

I get that this is mostly for fun, but this is as good a place as any to bring up an issue I rarely see discussed with any post about a new language. Well-established languages have tons of widely used, highly vetted libraries implementing functionality that doesn’t exist in the new language and would be totally impractical for an individual to implement themselves. For example, if I’m doing scientific computing, I n…

Totally agreed about FFI. I wanted to make it easy to interop with C code and write expressive bindings.

Check for example the language bindings to LLVM's C API (fairly low level) and Tree-Sitter which is used internally (a bit higher level bindings)

https://github.com/tibordp/alumina/tree/master/libraries/llv...

https://github.com/tibordp/alumina/blob/master/libraries/tre...

I think UFCS makes it quite nice for bindings, since external C functions can be used as if they were methods if the object is passed as the first parameter. So in many cases there might not even be a need to write wrapper structs for bindings that feel native.

Of course, it's still a manual process and since Alumina is just a compiler and stdlib for now (no llibrary ecosystem, no compiler driver), it's a bit cumbersome. But I like the approach Rust has with bindgen and cc crates, to automatically create bindings for C and C++ code.

Re: Show HN: Alumina Programming Language

#5

Post by danias »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #3

I get that this is mostly for fun, but this is as good a place as any to bring up an issue I rarely see discussed with any post about a new language. Well-established languages have tons of widely used, highly vetted libraries implementing functionality that doesn’t exist in the new language and would be totally impractical for an individual to implement themselves. For example, if I’m doing scientific computing, I n…

We are building a new language that is not for fun and we have thought of this important issue. We solve it with a Package Ports and Package Adapters. The Bitloops Language (BL) is a transpiled language with support for only TypeScript at the moment. Nonetheless, if it picks up we will be adding support for Java, C#, and C++ so that people can leverage their investments in their existing packages.

https://github.com/bitloops/bitloops-language

Re: Show HN: Alumina Programming Language

#7

Post by aliqot »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #3

I get that this is mostly for fun, but this is as good a place as any to bring up an issue I rarely see discussed with any post about a new language. Well-established languages have tons of widely used, highly vetted libraries implementing functionality that doesn’t exist in the new language and would be totally impractical for an individual to implement themselves. For example, if I’m doing scientific computing, I n…

Libraries are a farce. Stdlib or die. I 100% mean this and live this.

Re: Show HN: Alumina Programming Language

#8

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

aliqot wrote: post #7
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #3

I get that this is mostly for fun, but this is as good a place as any to bring up an issue I rarely see discussed with any post about a new language. Well-established languages have tons of widely used, highly vetted libraries implementing functionality that doesn’t exist in the new language and would be totally impractical for an individual to implement themselves. For example, if I’m doing scientific computing, I n…

Libraries are a farce. Stdlib or die. I 100% mean this and live this.

Libraries are how software is shared and reused.

Do you really intend to write your own library for a given task when there is a perfectly good and mature library that does that task and more freely available?

How long would it take for you to write your own Sqlite or your own Nginx?

Re: Show HN: Alumina Programming Language

#9

Post by Asraelite »

aliqot wrote: post #7
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #3

I get that this is mostly for fun, but this is as good a place as any to bring up an issue I rarely see discussed with any post about a new language. Well-established languages have tons of widely used, highly vetted libraries implementing functionality that doesn’t exist in the new language and would be totally impractical for an individual to implement themselves. For example, if I’m doing scientific computing, I n…

Libraries are a farce. Stdlib or die. I 100% mean this and live this.

That's a strange take. Do you mean that you would rather call external binaries directly, like Bash does, or that you would rather re-implement all functionality you need, however complex?
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