Nah, just a forum lurker who had a folder full of mods and maps and engine binaries much too large much too late. Didn't know how to code back then, and probably can't rocket jump anymore now. Mostly just surprised at having that old memory surface out of nowhere. Thanks for making that scene cooler way back when.
Let me take the opportunity to thank Wouter for the wonderful Amiga-E language I had the pleasure to use a long long long long time ago in a very different galaxy. Thanks!
- Multi-threading that uses separate memory spaces, meaning individual threads can run at max speed with no GIL overhead etc. Hmm? Does that mean that they are actual processes sharing no memory? EDIT: If so then that's a big downside. In Rust you get thread-safety for traditional, shared-memory threading/concurrency. Ideally you should be able to get as good as Rust for threading. Ultimately, I think it all depends…
This does not mean separate processes, it simply spawns one "VM" per thread. Lobster VMs are pretty light weight (just a self contained object that has everything for a program to run). The advantage is that everything inside one VM can be single threaded, down to memory allocator. The threads then communicate by sending each other lobster values, similar to a "tuple space". I personally think this explicit communica…
Ah, OK, sure. And I assume that Lobster compiles to bytecode then, that gets interpreted?
C++ is a complex beast and while I quite like working in it, I'm finding that the latest versions (17 and 20) are filled with features that I'm having trouble understanding. The surface for errors is also huge. I've been programming in C++ since about 2002 and I feel quite proficient in it, but, if given the option, I'll use something that is both safer/less error prone and more productive (and I say that as someone…
I'm not against creating new languages. In fact the Lobster language is something I would want (although current syntax is bit repulsive). Python with static types but without getting in the way is pure gold. The problem is that creating interpreter/compiler is one tiny little part of creating language. Much bigger task is creating vast number of libraries that every other popular languages have. Think about everythi…
You are not wrong. But you are assuming every language author must be wanting to become the next mainstream language. I am already aware Lobster will unlikely be that, and I am fine with it. I am having a ton of fun developing it, and I have used it for many projects. I do not want to have more impact by working on something more boring :)
I am an old Amiga user Vic-20, A1000, A500, etc., so I am a fan of the author. I tried running the sierpinski example with a pre-compiled Windows .exe that I placed in the lobster root directory, and it gives me this error: "can't open file: stdtype.lobster". I placed lobster and lobster/modules in my path, and it still throws the same error. I am assuming I need to build the .exe myself due to some incompatibility w…
Sorry, I need to do better at "getting started" documentation. The exe needs to be placed in the "lobster" dir under the root. It searches for "includes" relative to itself.
Not sure about the error involving "<".. are the executable and the data from the same version of Lobster? Open an issue on github or email me for more help :)
I am an old Amiga user Vic-20, A1000, A500, etc., so I am a fan of the author. I tried running the sierpinski example with a pre-compiled Windows .exe that I placed in the lobster root directory, and it gives me this error: "can't open file: stdtype.lobster". I placed lobster and lobster/modules in my path, and it still throws the same error. I am assuming I need to build the .exe myself due to some incompatibility w…
Sorry, I need to do better at "getting started" documentation. The exe needs to be placed in the "lobster" dir under the root. It searches for "includes" relative to itself. Not sure about the error involving "<".. are the executable and the data from the same version of Lobster? Open an issue on github or email me for more help :)
I'll build it as the site suggests, since I am using a binary from the release with the master branch modules. I'll follow up on github. Thanks!
I suggest people might pick up on that pretty quick, maybe no need to rename given some random comment. That said, maybe you want to have a gander through the various languages and see what words are used for what, and if there's a 'standard' go with that :) Cool language though. I love everything except for the name, sorry :)
Well, every time Lobster surfaces somewhere, I am always surprised how quickly people can superficially reject it because of some syntax issue, so yes, I agree, using predictable keywords where it makes no real difference matters. I've already made quite a few such changes. The name.. I think people will quickly forget about the original meaning. Think of all the languages you know, and how you associate the name wit…
The fact that you keep encountering it suggests that it's probably something in human nature to associate words, that ultimately don't matter, with how we've encountered them in languages in the past.
As for associating the name of the language, the only one I can't get past on that is 'Pony', it just has too much MLP fandom association for me to take it seriously.
Yes, it is directly relevant. And sure, many languages can dream of that level of use, but most other languages do not have the luxury of being there, and then making decisions that demonstrably do keep some people from using even a language as widely used as Python is worth at least thinking about. Especially when category of languages that does this is already dominated so thoroughly by Python.
Do you actually have any data on how many people don't use Python because of significant whitespace? I suspect it's actually a very vocal minority -- it's about as well-formed of a reason as refusing to use C++ because it requires semicolons.
It's a matter of personal taste, so it does not need to be "well formed". These things are more religious questions than about rational arguments. As for numbers, no, I don't. All I have to go by is the number of people I know or have met that dislike it. And so I know it is polarizing, but beyond that it is guesswork. The point was not to claim that it is some massive proportion of developers, but to point out that decisions of taste are not inconsequential.
can you drop the need for the : at the end of the line if there's a newline? i.e. it seems like unnecessary syntax
That would make it much harder to parse in certain cases, both for the compiler and the human, given that it uses this same syntax to parse not just control structures, but also higher order functions / lambdas.
Hi, author of the language here. Not a great time for HN exposure, as I just added a lot of new functionality, but none of that is documented yet :) But hey, all publicity is good publicity? For those interested, some recent things that have been happening: - Compile time reference counting. This does an analysis similar to the Rust borrow checker to infer lifetimes, but unlike Rust doesn't make the programmer jump t…
Would you mind elaborating on the "compile time reference counting"? Is this new? How does it handle cycles?
It is so new I haven't even documented it yet.. hence why I said the timing for this HN post isn't great. So imagine the current implementation does a lifetime analysis somewhat similar to Rust, but then where Rust would error out, this implementation simply inserts a runtime refc increase. This gets rid of most runtime refc overhead without the programmer needing to be clever about it. Then, I intend to add an optio…
This at first glance actually looks similar to http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:20899/FULLTEXT01.... And this style of static analysis has been taken even further by Luc Blaeser: http://concurrency.ch/Content/publications/Blaeser_Component... The cycle checker I'll have to have a look at - I'd like to crib parts of it for an OS I'm trying to cobble together. Your project looks very interesting, thanks!