Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Hare programming language

harelang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 323 posts

Re: The Hare programming language

#191

Post by ncmncm »

amelius wrote: post #179
ncmncm wrote: post #177

The first thing I look for in something that claims to be a systems language is whether it provides anything that helps me out. First and foremost, does it provide any primitive that can be used for automation? C++ brought destructors, Rust did a Drop trait. What do you have? Second, does it provide any way to operate on types? C++ got templates, Rust offers generics. What do you have? Third, does it provide useful c…

> We have learned things since then. Have you? We have learned to read the documentation before we judge things.

I have learned to check on some basic facts before committing a huge block of time to another pointless exercise. The world seems mostly to have learned to serve up way more pointless exercises.

One choice is to just ignore everything, which almost always produces the right answer. But that will miss the thing that would have been worth looking into. Another choice is to try ways to filter out chaff. What is not a possible choice is to dig into everything that might conceivably be interesting.

One thing we can always be sure of: if it is meant to appeal mainly to C coders, it will fall flat, because everybody who is still using C has seen a thousand languages go by and passed on all of them.

Re: The Hare programming language

#192

Post by tayistay »

jpe90 wrote: post #84

Since the language is officially announced now, here's an interesting analysis on the language: https://tilde.team/~kiedtl/blog/hare/ Personally I'm very interesting in playing with it. Generics, functional programming constructs, and a lot of the syntactic sugar you find in modern languages have their uses but I think there's a lot of merit to the idea that you might not want them in a systems language. I think clea…

From that article: "The real question is, does Hare have an[y] business existing when Zig and Myrddin already exist?"

Why do people question whether something such as a programming language has business existing? Do they believe in a zero-sum theory of human attention? By "business existing" are they really questioning whether we should pay any attention to it? Serious question, because I find it somewhat disturbing on some philosophical level.

Re: The Hare programming language

#193

Post by IshKebab »

zozbot234 wrote: post #45
vladharbuz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can sort of understand where you're coming from — manual memory management can be difficult, and doing it improperly can cause bugs. However, in my experience, we're very far from having a magical solution for memory management. C++ definitely isn't it, and while Rust does bring significant advances in this field, it's a very large and complicated language. Unfortunately, the memory management strategy of every oth…

> C++ definitely isn't it, and while Rust does bring significant advances in this field, it's a very large and complicated language. It really isn't. Not compared to C++, at least. Or to managed language runtimes, which are just as "large and complicated", only beneath the hood.

Rust is definitely as complicated as C++. However its complexity isn't as big of a deal because it's so much safer. If you forget one of the extremely complicated Rust rules you'll get a compile error. If you forget one of the extremely complicated C++ rules you hopefully will get a compile error. Maybe a warning with `-Wall` or maybe you'll silently get memory errors at runtime!

Re: The Hare programming language

#195

Post by mamcx »

vladharbuz wrote: post #21
staticassertion wrote: post #19

lol my other post got flagged, so let me reiterate perhaps in a less inflammatory way. It is disappointing to see that "trust the programmer" is a design goal. Programmers can not be trusted with manual memory management. We have decades of proof, billions and billions of dollars of bug fixes and mitigation investments, real world damages, etc. Building a language like this and saying you hope it will be the foundati…

I can sort of understand where you're coming from — manual memory management can be difficult, and doing it improperly can cause bugs. However, in my experience, we're very far from having a magical solution for memory management. C++ definitely isn't it, and while Rust does bring significant advances in this field, it's a very large and complicated language. Unfortunately, the memory management strategy of every oth…

> while Rust does bring significant advances in this field, it's a very large and complicated language.

The gist of Rust on this fairly easy, is the heritage/chasing of C++ that makes Rust complicated.

A "Rust simple like pascal/c" have potential and I bet 1 billon the borrow checker will not make it hard to use (check https://vale.dev)

Re: The Hare programming language

#197

Post by nine_k »

ncmncm wrote: post #177

The first thing I look for in something that claims to be a systems language is whether it provides anything that helps me out. First and foremost, does it provide any primitive that can be used for automation? C++ brought destructors, Rust did a Drop trait. What do you have? Second, does it provide any way to operate on types? C++ got templates, Rust offers generics. What do you have? Third, does it provide useful c…

From my brief look at the documentation, the answers look like this: they have a defer statement much like Go's, they don't seem to have any form of generics, they don't seem to have any form of comptime logic.

They really need a section on the landing page to compare Hare to Zig. (And to C, for that matter.)

Re: The Hare programming language

#198

Post by IshKebab »

zozbot234 wrote: post #90
the_duke wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sympathetic, but I agree with others that any new systems language in 2022 must have memory and thread safety with minimal escape hatches as its utmost priority and a core component of the language design. Otherwise, what's the point? Yet another language that is a bit more convenient than the alternatives but doesn't do much to help with all the vulnerabilities and bugs in our software? We already have quite a…

> Rust is by no means the ultima ratio. It's complex and places a lot of immediate burden on the developer. I'm sure there are better solutions out there that don't sacrifice the safety guarantess. There are undoubtedly better solutions than Rust, but they tend to allow for more developer-managed complexity rather than less! For example, one might imagine a cleaned-up variety of the GhostCell pattern, to decouple own…

I don't think that's really the case. I can't think of any new safe GC-free languages that are more "manual" than Rust, but there are at least a couple that use reference counting with compile time optimisations to make it not really slow. Koka looks the most interesting to me at the moment.

Re: The Hare programming language

#199

Post by [deleted] »

magnio wrote: post #114
jpe90 wrote: post #84

Since the language is officially announced now, here's an interesting analysis on the language: https://tilde.team/~kiedtl/blog/hare/ Personally I'm very interesting in playing with it. Generics, functional programming constructs, and a lot of the syntactic sugar you find in modern languages have their uses but I think there's a lot of merit to the idea that you might not want them in a systems language. I think clea…

> Labeled loops > I'm not yet sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Sure, you can do clever shenanigans now, but something tells me this will make the code's control flow much harder to follow. The most popular example I can think of is JavaScript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... Tbh, I think the opposite is true: without the ability to break outer loops, I have resorted to…

[deleted]

Re: The Hare programming language

#200

Post by conaclos »

nine_k wrote: post #197
ncmncm wrote: post #177

The first thing I look for in something that claims to be a systems language is whether it provides anything that helps me out. First and foremost, does it provide any primitive that can be used for automation? C++ brought destructors, Rust did a Drop trait. What do you have? Second, does it provide any way to operate on types? C++ got templates, Rust offers generics. What do you have? Third, does it provide useful c…

From my brief look at the documentation, the answers look like this: they have a defer statement much like Go's, they don't seem to have any form of generics, they don't seem to have any form of comptime logic. They really need a section on the landing page to compare Hare to Zig. (And to C, for that matter.)

It seems that Hare has some restricted comptime logic. See section 6.8 of the spec [1]

[1] https://harelang.org/specification.pdf

Post reply on HN