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Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

gossamer-lang.org

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Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#41

Post by jeremyjh »

This is exactly the language I've been yearning for - the exact motivations and intersection of features that would be the sweet spot for me.

Kotlin without the Java baggage. Rust but with automated memory management and without async bifurcation. Go with a modern type system. Swift but with green threads and a linux community. Haskell without the hair shirt. Elixir with a full type system and native performance.

But yes there are some flags others have mentioned, I won't repeat them. "goroutines" ?

Even on the off chance this project is not entirely vibe coded how could it ever build an ecosystem? How can any new language? All the libraries would be suspect for the same reason this repo is. The agents won't know anything about it, no one will believe it can get momentum so it won't.

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#42

Post by LunicLynx »

jeremyjh wrote: post #41

This is exactly the language I've been yearning for - the exact motivations and intersection of features that would be the sweet spot for me. Kotlin without the Java baggage. Rust but with automated memory management and without async bifurcation. Go with a modern type system. Swift but with green threads and a linux community. Haskell without the hair shirt. Elixir with a full type system and native performance. But…

Just a comment: Rust does not have a garbage collector

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#43

Post by jeremyjh »

gf000 wrote: post #34
samuell wrote: post #12

Glad to see more languages adopt true goroutines [edit: lightweight threads or fibers] with M:N scheduling. Surprised more haven't. Among compiled language I'm only aware of Go and Crystal off the top of my mind.

Haskell, Java

Java and Crystal are not equivalent - neither have preemptible threads. Lots of other languages have co-routines or other cooperative systems - async/await are really just variants of that.

I didn't check if Gossamer is actually preemptible.

I believe the short list of production languages with preemptible M:N schedulers are limited to:

Erlang/Elixir

Haskell

Go

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#44

Post by jeremyjh »

LunicLynx wrote: post #42
jeremyjh wrote: post #41

This is exactly the language I've been yearning for - the exact motivations and intersection of features that would be the sweet spot for me. Kotlin without the Java baggage. Rust but with automated memory management and without async bifurcation. Go with a modern type system. Swift but with green threads and a linux community. Haskell without the hair shirt. Elixir with a full type system and native performance. But…

Just a comment: Rust does not have a garbage collector

Thanks - edited - I meant to say "but with a" garbage collector. I like Rust, but I don't like thinking about ownership all the time. Although when I just make Codex do it its really not that bad.

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#46

Post by Jtsummers »

I can't figure out the point of having both go and spawn. `spawn` seems to be an ordinary thread spawning mechanism, generating a handle that you can join with (but not cancel? can't find that for certain, it's not actually in the tour but is in the SPEC.md). `go` inherits all the problems of go routines. You can't join with it, you can't cancel it, you have to build other infrastructure on top of it to achieve those effects. As neat as golang was 17 years ago when it came out, this was and still is a major weakness of the language which has resulted in the community developing conventions (now standardized in the go standard library and particular usage patterns) around how to deal with it. I don't get why you'd half fix it (by introducing spawn) but then leave it in anyways. Just let the handle from spawn be ignored and you remove that particular footgun (it becomes a choice to ignore it, which still causes problems but at least the programmer chose to shoot towards their own foot).

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#47

Post by cure_42 »

felixgallo wrote: post #30
throwrioawfo wrote: post #7

There was once a time when I'd see a page like this and think "wow, must be a great project with such a polished website". Now, it's just a neutral or perhaps even very slightly negative signal (especially the em-dash in the very first line of the page). Anyone able to tell me if this is a project actually worth paying attention to, or just another raindrop in the current monsoon of slop?

you know what's even worse than slop? Zero-effort 'is this maybe slop can someone tell me' posting.

No.

A site for an entirely new programming language being slop is atrocious.

An entirely unimportant one minute comment on social media being low effort? Normal and expected and appropriate.

What on earth are you on?

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#48

Post by cure_42 »

IshKebab wrote: post #39

It's only 2 months old. Clearly vibe coded. Still, kind of crazy what you can vibe code now. Also the actual language design seems quite nice. I'd love something like this that was embeddable (and not vibe coded). There are basically no good easily embeddable languages. Everyone used Lua but it sucks.

Why not embedded rust?

Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory

#49

Post by reocha »

Three things stick out to me on https://gossamer-lang.org/docs/migration/rust/

* No user macros at all. Six fixed format! / println!-family macros expand at parse time. - Meta programming is incredibly important in rust.

* (unsafe is) Forbidden at the language level. No unsafe keyword in Gossamer source. std is safe-Rust too. - No low level programming then.

* No move semantics. Non-trivial values are heap-allocated, reference-counted, and shared by reference; primitives are copied the same as Rust. - Again, no low level programming.

Calling this rust flavored (or even a systems programming language) seems a bit bold.

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