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Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

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Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

#1

Post by beariish »

I've built many interpreters over the years, and Bolt represents my attempt at building the scripting language I always wanted. This is the first public release, 0.1.0!

I've felt like most embedded languages have been moving towards safety and typing over years, with things like Python type hints, the explosive popularity of typescript, and even typing in Luau, which powers one of the largest scripted evironments in the world.

Bolt attempts to harness this directly in the lagnauge rather than as a preprocessing step, and reap benefits in terms of both safety and performance.

I intend to be publishing toys and examples of applications embedding Bolt over the coming few weeks, but be sure to check out the examples and the programming guide in the repo if you're interested!

Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C
github.com

Re: Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

#5

Post by beariish »

grodriguez100 wrote: post #4

Sounds very good, and I can see many use cases in embedded systems. But that probably requires 32-bit arm support. Is that planned ?

As of right now no - my primary target when developing this was realtime and games in particular since that's what I know best, but if there's a real target in embedded that's certainly something that could be explored.

Re: Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

#6

Post by MobiusHorizons »

FYI "the embedded scene" is likely to be interpreted as "embedded systems" rather than "embedded interpreters" even by people who know about embedded interpreters, especially since all the languages you give as an example have been attempted for use on those targets (micropython, lua, and even typescript)

Re: Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

#7

Post by thrance »

Function return type inference is funny but I don't think it's that great of a feature. It makes it harder for a library's consumer to know how to properly use a function, and it also makes it harder for the maintainer to not break backwards compatibility inadvertently. Anyway, I'm all for experimenting.

Re: Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

#8

Post by beariish »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #6

FYI "the embedded scene" is likely to be interpreted as "embedded systems" rather than "embedded interpreters" even by people who know about embedded interpreters, especially since all the languages you give as an example have been attempted for use on those targets (micropython, lua, and even typescript)

That's a good point, thank you. I've made a small edit to clarify.

Re: Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

#9

Post by beariish »

thrance wrote: post #7

Function return type inference is funny but I don't think it's that great of a feature. It makes it harder for a library's consumer to know how to properly use a function, and it also makes it harder for the maintainer to not break backwards compatibility inadvertently. Anyway, I'm all for experimenting.

There's nothing stopping a library author from explicitly annotating return types wherever a stable interface is important, the idea is more for smaller functions or callbacks to make use of this. Perhaps I'll make the examples clearer to reflect the intention.
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