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XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

xslang.org

31–40 of 44 posts

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#31
https://github.com/xs-lang0/xs/blob/d9e11545685c29c054c50c52...

    Every other piece of
    * the old tier-1 dispatch JIT (the ~1500 lines of per-opcode helpers,
    * the jump-table dispatcher, the jit_rt_* runtime shims) was deleted
    * because benchmarks showed tier-2 dominated on every workload that
    * reached the JIT at all. */
No human cares about including such an irrelevant detail as the lines of code in helper functions. Obvious LLM context spew, obvious AI slop project. Please stop posting things you didn't bother actually working on.

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#32

I liked it. AI-generated or not, syntactic decisions are tasteful and the language itself checks all the important boxes. Too bad that agentic world basically destroyed all programming languages that are not Python, Typescript or Rust.

Have you actually tried other languages?? I used Dart, Common Lisp, Java, Kotlin, Groovy and more and LLM seems to be as good at those as on Python.

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#33
post #9

This language, README, website has been written by AI agents. At one point, the author may have written a fair bit of code by hand (starting with a Crafting Interpreters project, and then adapting it recently using agents?). The commit history is very confusing. The design of the VM is nearly identical to the clox interpreter in Crafting Interpreters . There's also a bit of Lua inspiration mixed in the instruction en…

The polymorphism looks a little half-missing as well (checker.c):

  /* generalize: check if vars in t are free (not bound in env).
   For now, a simplified version that just returns the type as-is. */
  CkType *ck_generalize(CkTypeEnv *env, CkType *t) {
So the identity func (id x = x) stays a monotype?

Also, I'm not seeing any more or less safety in this code than the surrounding code:

  /* thread-safe version that returns allocated string */
  static char *type_to_str_alloc(CkType \*t) {
    char buf[512];
    type_to_buf(t, buf, sizeof buf);
    return xs_strdup(buf);
  }
Are multiple type-checking threads blasting through this at the same time?

The most interesting claim that this file makes is that it does HM-inference as well as subtyping. I'm smart enough to parrot "that's undecidable" even if I'm too dumb to know why.

HM is hard enough without taking the sizeof pointers and mallocing every few lines.

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#34
post #4

All the copy is entirely generated. I can't find any actual human associated with this thing. At this point, it doesn't really matter what the language does, because the author and I have mutual respect. There is none.

Yeah, that's my concern too. I might be interested in checking out an AI-developed language, if I knew who was working on it, could research them as a person (are they an undergrad pre-career or retired post-career?), see previous projects of theirs, or even contact them. But I have no interest in some anonymous project that has no provenance and no chance of longevity.

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#35
I don't buy "Anywhere, anytime, by anyone" - no language can be that. Different people and different projects have wildly different needs. It looks like it tries to provide a single binary offering most of the compiler, debugger, linter, etc. on "all" platforms. Noble goal in itself, useful for some cases, but utterly irrelevant for many (most?) projects. If I have already decided to work on Linus, I don't care about Windows compatibility. And why "by anyone"? If a language is optimized for school kids, it can not be optimal for serious professionals, and vice versa.

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#36

Initially, the page looked very intriguing and the promises looked every fascinating. A whole DX toolchain in one binary? The binary can run in different systems? Only 3 MB? Then I read the comments here saying its ai slop, I lost all my interest now.

why? why you should care if it is human written or by ai, if the result is the same?

Because the result isn't the same. Not yet anyway.

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#37
post #9

This language, README, website has been written by AI agents. At one point, the author may have written a fair bit of code by hand (starting with a Crafting Interpreters project, and then adapting it recently using agents?). The commit history is very confusing. The design of the VM is nearly identical to the clox interpreter in Crafting Interpreters . There's also a bit of Lua inspiration mixed in the instruction en…

Heads up folks: this comment appears to be 100% ai generated according to pangram.

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#38

I liked it. AI-generated or not, syntactic decisions are tasteful and the language itself checks all the important boxes. Too bad that agentic world basically destroyed all programming languages that are not Python, Typescript or Rust.

Works well enough on C! And even Fortran...

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#39

Perl developers that depend on XS [1] for extending their code's behavior will have a "lovely" time with this lol! Here's an example https://github.com/adriaandens/XSamples/blob/master/XSamples... [1] https://perldoc.perl.org/perlxs

Ah! I was wondering why such a small language had syntax highlighting on Github, but it was just an alias. That explains it!

Re: XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone

#40
post #32

I liked it. AI-generated or not, syntactic decisions are tasteful and the language itself checks all the important boxes. Too bad that agentic world basically destroyed all programming languages that are not Python, Typescript or Rust.

Have you actually tried other languages?? I used Dart, Common Lisp, Java, Kotlin, Groovy and more and LLM seems to be as good at those as on Python.

Of course. I write Scala and Elixir too. The problem is that they are a tiny bit less seamless. Maybe 5%. And with coding assistant speeds, this is enough to compound. And even less teams choose them than before. And it accelerates.
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