41–50 of 99 posts
I would love to see Java inspired language compiled to Go. I really like Go portability and standard library and Java... verbosity. I prefer explicit names, types and all the syntax around that. Graalvm is not an answer for me because as far as I'm aware it doesn't support cross-compile.
Now that you got foundation created, let's see how to move it forward.
I've never liked Go, but its strengths are absolutely compiling to single binaries, fast compile times, and concurrency primitives (not necessarily using them) etc. Compiling to Go is a great idea.
That's two new languages compiling to Go making HN frontpage in as many days. It seems people like everything about Go except the language itself. Me? I like everything about Go including the language, these transpiled languages are interesting though. But I keep wondering if they could integrate at a lower-level than the source code. Like how JVM languages integrate at the bytecode level, or LLVM languages at the LL…
What was the other one? I'm working on a language that transpiles to Zig with a custom Go-like runtime (and no garbage collector, Rust-style Affine movement instead). Sky seems quite cool, as it's additive to Go in interesting ways. I originally considered keeping the GC and just transpiling to Go so I didn't need to write a Runtime. Go rules! It really does. But I HATE writing/reading Go. So I'm glad more people are…
A transpilation step though? I'll accept that in Typescript (barely) but not for any other language really.
If you allow FFI are you really inspired by Elm? ;)
First - awesome job. Congrats. Self hosting is an accomplishment! But I'm curious to get your thoughts on the process in hindsight. I understand why it's valuable: to cast a wide net in catching bugs and give a good signal that your language is generally "ready". I'm working on a similar language, but worried about going down the self-hosting path, as I think it'd slow me down rather than speed me up. How did it work…
What's the actual accomplishment here? It seems like the language came into existence a month ago and was written mostly by Claude. If self hosting is a matter of asking Claude to do it and it takes a couple weeks, is it really an accomplishment at all?
"Yes, but you didn't."
Somewhat unrelated to the language itself: > The compiler bootstraps through 3+ generations of self-compilation. I guess it applies to any language compiler, but f you are self-hosting, you will naturally release binary packages. Please make sure you have enough support behind the project to setup secure build pipeline. As a user, we will never be able to see something even one nesting-level up.
If I ever write a compiler - God forbid, because language design is exactly the kind of elegance bike-shedding I'll never crawl my way out of - it's going to be a straight-up C89 transpiler, with conditional asm inlines for optional modern features like SIMD. It would compile on anything and run on anything, for free, forever. Why would I ever give that up for some self-hosting social cachet?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need more pragmatic languages. E.g. Erlang and Elixir are functional, but eschew all the things FP purists advocate for (complex type systems, purity, currying by default etc.)
If you like Erlang, Elixir, and Elm/Haskell, then Gleam + Lustre (which is TEA) is a pretty great fit.
Nice to see another language with Haskell / Miranda type syntax, but the vibe-coded implementation sure shows: e.g. src/Compiler/Infer.sky isUpperStart: isUpperStart : String -> Bool isUpperStart name = case String.slice 0 1 name of "A" -> True "B" -> True "C" -> True ... for 23 more cases. And the corresponding go code in the bootstrap compiler is even worse.
Somewhat unrelated to the language itself: > The compiler bootstraps through 3+ generations of self-compilation. I guess it applies to any language compiler, but f you are self-hosting, you will naturally release binary packages. Please make sure you have enough support behind the project to setup secure build pipeline. As a user, we will never be able to see something even one nesting-level up.
I feel like there's too much of a fetish for self-hosting. There's this pernicious idea that a language isn't a 'real' language until it's self-hosted, but a self-hosted compiler imposes real costs in terms of portability, build integrity, etc. If I ever write a compiler - God forbid, because language design is exactly the kind of elegance bike-shedding I'll never crawl my way out of - it's going to be a straight-up…