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The C3 Programming Language

c3-lang.org

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Re: The C3 Programming Language

#4

Post by theflyinghorse »

I keep thinking about perhaps LLMs would make writing code in these lower-level-but-far-better-performing languages in vogue. Why have claude generate a python service when you could write a rust or C3 service with compiler doing a lot of heavy lifting around memory bugs?

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#6

Post by netbioserror »

This is neat and I wish C3 well. But using Nim has shown me the light on maybe the most important innovation I've seen in a native-compiled systems language: Everything, even heap-allocated data, having value semantics by default.

In Nim, strings and seqs exist on the heap, but are managed by simple value-semantic wrappers on the stack, where the pointer's lifetime is easy to statically analyze. Moves and destroys can be automatic by default. All string ops return string, there are no special derivative types. Seq ops return seq, there are no special derivative types. Do you pay the price of the occasional copy? Yes. But there are opt-in trapdoors to allocate RC- or manually-managed strings and seqs. Otherwise, the default mode of interacting with heap data is an absolute breeze.

For the life of me, I don't know why other languages haven't leaned harder into such a transformative feature.

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#8

Post by klysm »

theflyinghorse wrote: post #4

I keep thinking about perhaps LLMs would make writing code in these lower-level-but-far-better-performing languages in vogue. Why have claude generate a python service when you could write a rust or C3 service with compiler doing a lot of heavy lifting around memory bugs?

Because there’s more python on the internet to interpolate from. LLMs are not equally good at all languages

Re: The C3 Programming Language

#9

Post by notimetorelax »

theflyinghorse wrote: post #4

I keep thinking about perhaps LLMs would make writing code in these lower-level-but-far-better-performing languages in vogue. Why have claude generate a python service when you could write a rust or C3 service with compiler doing a lot of heavy lifting around memory bugs?

Having worked with rust in the past couple years, I can say that it hands down much better fit for LLMs than Python thanks to its explicitness and type information. This provides a lot of context for LLM to incrementally grow the codebase. You still have to watch it, of course. But the experience is very pleasant.
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