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The Lobster Programming Language

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Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#31

Post by kragen »

Aardappel wrote: post #14

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…

Hi! I might be an embarrassingly gushing fanboy about everything you do, so I'm probably biased here. (I wrote the FlatBuffers Wikipedia page, for example.) Lobster is pretty inspiring (despite not being nearly as radical as, e.g., Aardappel) with its lightweight lambdas and (like most of your work) a very minimal core language.

Is there a comparison of different versions of Lobster somewhere? I'd like to be able to make statements like "My new language XYZ, unlike Lobster, is dynamically typed, resulting in difficulties such as plicplocpluc in developing the IDE" but different versions of Lobster now cover such a large part of the language design space that this is becoming difficult. For example, that statement doesn't make sense with respect to old versions of Lobster, which were also dynamically typed.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#32

Post by nathanielc »

Aardappel wrote: post #14

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…

Looks really interesting. Have you done any write ups on the type inference bits?

Flow sensitive type inference looks like exactly what I need.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#33

Post by kragen »

nathanielc wrote: post #32
Aardappel wrote: post #14

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…

Looks really interesting. Have you done any write ups on the type inference bits? Flow sensitive type inference looks like exactly what I need.

The standard work on flow-sensitive higher-order type inference proceeds from Olin Shivers's dissertation, but Oortmerssen has written a bit about his ideas on lambda-the-ultimate.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#34

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

Aardappel wrote: post #14

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…

Sigh...Python indentation? I thought we'd moved beyond that as an industry...

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#35

Post by nikofeyn »

Empact wrote: post #28
Aardappel wrote: post #14

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…

Do you plan to accommodate multi-line lambda? Python is hamstrung on this front thanks to the white-space oriented formatting.

f# has white-space oriented formatting.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#36

Post by iaabtpbtpnn »

nikofeyn wrote: post #35
Empact wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you plan to accommodate multi-line lambda? Python is hamstrung on this front thanks to the white-space oriented formatting.

f# has white-space oriented formatting.

OCaml doesn't care about white space, and I don't think SML does either, although F# does. Maybe you are thinking of Haskell?

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#37

Post by nikofeyn »

iaabtpbtpnn wrote: post #36
nikofeyn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

f# has white-space oriented formatting.

OCaml doesn't care about white space, and I don't think SML does either, although F# does. Maybe you are thinking of Haskell?

i am sorry. you are right. i misremembered about sml (haven't written in it much and in a while) and incorrectly lumped in ocaml. i should have been more careful. f# was what was really on my mind.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#38

Post by obastani »

Aardappel wrote: post #19
calebwin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any chance you could you share some references on this kind of type inference? It sounds very interesting!

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#39

Post by dfox »

Major reason why many game engines used to have native core and then some kind of "scripting" language for game logic (think Unreal Engine before 3, but many engines are similar) is that then you can trivially serialize the simulation state (ie. save game) and even run the whole thing as either lock-step, forward predicted or fully distributed network game without much effort on the part of whoever is writing the "scripting language" part of the game code.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#40

Post by fouc »

Aardappel wrote: post #14

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…

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
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