Ante: A low-level functional language • Hacker News Board

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#171

Post by jfecher » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 11:09 PM UTC

raphlinus wrote: post #165

jfecher wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, a key goal is to have no explicit region/lifetime annotations. There have been several papers on region inference after the originals by Tofte & Taplin, all attempting to refine the original analysis by inferring shorter lifetimes. First by analyzing when a region can be safely emptied and re-used, then by abandoning the stack discipline, etc. Unfortunately, none of these are viable in a real program in my o…

Hey, thanks for calling my work "not viable!" (Co-author of "Better Static Memory Management" here) Seriously, this looks promising and I'm very interested to see where it goes.

Ack, my apologies, I didn't intend to be so inflammatory! If memory serves AFL was one of the first schemes (or perhaps the first?) to abandon the stack discipline to provide better inference in quite a few cases compared to TT. I remember the graphs in that paper giving me more hope for region inference to be a practical memory management scheme. Later, I believe the imperative regions paper improved on the AFL scheme a bit at least in their single 'life' example, but without more test cases or graphs it is more difficult in general to assess that paper or how common this case matters in practice. I'm curious what you believe the future of research for region inference to be considering most of the papers written after TT's retrospective paper seem to have moved in the direction of explicit regions rather than inferred ones.

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#172

Post by throwaway17_17 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 11:27 PM UTC

funny_falcon wrote: post #157

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was basically my motivation when I designed the language I use for my day-to-day tasks where I program. I just wanted a ‘functional’ sort-of language that compiled to C. Even though I’ll never release it, it was a rewarding theoretical and practical exercise. As an aside, I really love how detailed and example-ful Ante’s site is. It looks like a ‘fun’ language and I hope the creator keeps working on it.

May be it is time for "coming out"? (Excuse me for the joke). Really, perhaps your language is The Next One.

I strongly doubt that, most people would look at it and say it was a concatenative language (it’s not, but that is a semantics issue) and immediate disregard. The language, while being a modal dependently typed language, there is no mandatory ‘safety’ features and memory is largely manually managed. And after the blowback, complaints, and negativity posts about Hare on HN, I just don’t care to argue the fact that my language exists.

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#173

Post by astrange » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 11:54 PM UTC

wtetzner wrote: post #153

whoomp12342 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

low is relative :-D my thought exactly. IMO the only low level language is assembly. Everything else is some form of abstraction. C/C++ and the likes I tend to call lower, since in 2022 it is closer to the hardware, and then sugar languages like python, c#, js, and the likes I call high level.

Even assembly languages are abstractions.

Strangely the language "below" assembly, Verilog, is a lot more abstract and tries to pretend to look like C while generating hardware, so writing it is more like imagining how to trick it into doing what you want.

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#174

Post by benniomars » Sat, Jun 18, 2022, 12:50 AM UTC

charleskinbote wrote: post #85

jfecher wrote: post #58

Hello, author here! As the website says, the compiler itself is still in a very early state where basic things like functions, types, traits, inference, monomorphisation, and codegen are implemented. The fun stuff of algebraic effects, lifetime inference, and refinement types are not however. Though I can elaborate on implementation strategies of these for anyone curious. For example, algebraic effects in existing la…

Thanks for sharing! The dot product example gave me pause because map2 seems to be the same as zipWith. Does that exist in Ante? Without context I might have thought map2 was going to act as bimap. Take that for what you think it's worth :) Also I might be having a brain fart -- but isn't the dot product in your example equal to 32?

I calculated the dot product in my head because it looked off. Then I calculated it in my computer. Then I came to the comment section before losing all confidence in what I thought was a dot product of two vectors.

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#175

Post by omniscient_oce » Sat, Jun 18, 2022, 1:05 AM UTC

Drup wrote: post #166

funny_falcon wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ocaml doesn't compile to C. Sometimes having translated C source is major gain. I'm not Ocaml implementation expert, but I suppose Ocaml exception handling and garbage collector could be tricky to aware about when one extend or embed Ocaml. To be honestly, my fellow did Ocaml embedding once. He made able to load natively-compiled plugins written in Ocaml into C based software. And it worked. I didn't dig into details…

`ocaml-ctypes` currently supports "reverse-bindings" (making OCaml functions available from C) out-of-the-box and mostly takes care of the intersection you are talking about, so this already works quite well. The only gain from emiting C code is portability to weird architecture that would be covered by C compilers but not the OCaml one; which is arguably a pretty niche use-case.

I thought OCaml was dropping support for 32-bit ARM. I wouldn't call that a weird architecture to want to run on.

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#176

Post by agumonkey » Sat, Jun 18, 2022, 1:14 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #161

agumonkey wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also alternate between various positions in programming languages, so it's not a matter of formal precision.

Not sure what you mean by “alternate between various positions”.

Prefix for function, infix in expressions, and postfix if you use forth

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#177

Post by no_wizard » Sat, Jun 18, 2022, 1:34 AM UTC

I like the ideas!

Not a huge fan of the whitespace delineated syntax though. I like me some curly braces.

Other than that though, it is super interesting!

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#178

Post by quickthrower2 » Sat, Jun 18, 2022, 2:42 AM UTC

funny_falcon wrote: post #119

jfecher wrote: post #58

Hello, author here! As the website says, the compiler itself is still in a very early state where basic things like functions, types, traits, inference, monomorphisation, and codegen are implemented. The fun stuff of algebraic effects, lifetime inference, and refinement types are not however. Though I can elaborate on implementation strategies of these for anyone curious. For example, algebraic effects in existing la…

I'd really like to find "the low-level functional language" without "the fun stuff". Or at least it should have simple and boring subset that is usable without "the fun stuff". Something like Caml Light - precursor to Ocaml - but with translation to C instead of bytecode, so it will be fast and will have comfortable integration with C libraries.

Why compile to C when you can use LLVM?

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#179

Post by jfecher » Sat, Jun 18, 2022, 3:09 AM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #178

funny_falcon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd really like to find "the low-level functional language" without "the fun stuff". Or at least it should have simple and boring subset that is usable without "the fun stuff". Something like Caml Light - precursor to Ocaml - but with translation to C instead of bytecode, so it will be fast and will have comfortable integration with C libraries.

Why compile to C when you can use LLVM?

C can sometimes be an easier target since you don't have to learn LLVM's API. C is also more portable than llvm since there is a greater variety of C compilers for a greater variety of architectures than llvm targets.

Re: Ante: A low-level functional language

#180

Post by IncRnd » Sat, Jun 18, 2022, 4:22 AM UTC

jfecher wrote: post #146

trumpeta wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what makes Ante low level? Just from a cursory look over the website seems pretty high level to me.

My definition of low level is no tracing GC, values are unboxed by default, and users still have control to do low level things (raw pointers, other unsafe operations) when needed, even if it is not the default.

The generally accepted definition of a low level language is a language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture. In actuality, C is a lower level functional programming language than Ante, because C functions are first-class citizens.

I like the lack of GC! What is the method for always incremental compilation? The benefits are obvious, but isn't it problematic to have two authoritative representations of the same source? It would be fantastic if you get that to work well!