8 ms·

Bog – small, strongly typed, embeddable language

189 points by tsujp 4y ago

samsquire 4y ago
I am glad to see coroutines. How are coroutines scheduled? Can suspend return a value?
timeon 4y ago
Can match return value? It is not clear from the example since it has many duplicated print functions instead.
JonChesterfield 4y ago
Thank you for posting this. > let {print} = import "std.io" An idea obvious in hindsight that I hadn't thought before - if import returns an environment and let can destructure, then a pattern match can bind an explicit subset of that import. Something like: `(let {print read} (import io) (print (read)))` Further down I find essentially that example (with input instead of read) and destructuring assignment within function arguments: `let add = fn ((a,b)) a + b` though the grammar suggests that {} is initialisation and not a map/dict/hash/assoc/environment style thing, so you probably don't have `fn ({key value}) value + 4` or similar for taking maps apart as they are passed to a function. Thus I think import is special cased. The bytecode layer knows what maps are though, so maybe they're just missing from the syntax
- benj111 4y ago
  Something I hate about about c is that you don't know where the hell somefunc() came from. Some languages have foo.somefunc() which I think works quite well although iffooisrealllylong.function() is a risk. I suppose this gets you the best of both worlds. Although using let does seem a bit weird to me. It seems conceptually misleading.
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    > Something I hate about about c is that you don't know where the hell somefunc() came from. I think you mean something you hate about not using an IDE with the language. One can do `from onoz import *` in python and Java to have a similar "wait, where did do_magic() come from?" experience, and then Scala will see your wildcard import and raise you implicit methods, which can die in a raging fire tornado
    - benj111 4y ago
      >I think you mean something you hate about not using an IDE with the language Well it's a 'feature' of the language so the criticism still stands. Ides could solve a lot of language warts but we still rightfully criticise the language for the warts. C's lack of memory safety could be solved by good programming practices, but we still criticise c for the lack of memory safety.
  - mytailorisrich 4y ago
    This is true that there is no language feature to enforce this. But this can be worked around by enforcing naming functions with adequate prefixes, which is a very common approach, if not a best practice.
- polotics 4y ago
  Funny, I find this syntax very obtuse: it looks to me like "print" is being defined as, well, the print function, through a very roundabout name collision. What happens if there is a typo and the code says: let {ptint} =... What error message comes up?
  - hmry 4y ago
    Well I can't test it in bog, but TypeScript allows exactly this syntax and it will give you an error like "Property ptint does not exist on type ..." One would imagine that let {print} = import "std.io" is equivalent to let print = (import "std.io").print
  - icambron 4y ago
    "Obtuse" is maybe not the word you were looking for. Opaque perhaps? This kind of destructuring syntax is common in many newish languages -- Rust, Clojure, newer flavors of JS, Typescript, etc -- and becomes second nature pretty quickly. What you're seeing is really two things: first that you can pull apart a map as part of assignment, and second that there's sugar to name the variable after the map key. In JS, you could write: const { foo: bar } = something And that's sugar for const bar = something.foo At the same time, JS many other languages have pervasive support for the idea that often you want the same name for a variable as the map key where you're going to use it. So, e.g. const mapOfFoo = { foo } is equivalent to const mapOfFoo = { foo: foo } Combining these things, you get: const { foo } = something Equivalent to const foo = something.foo i.e. the variable/property auto-aliasing works in the destructure too. When you consider that you are importing a big object with a bunch of fields and functions hung off of it, it becomes natural for that to work the same way: import { foo } from "someplace" I'd argue that it's not actually opaque, let alone obtuse; it's merely unfamiliar because it's (I'm guessing) a combination of unfamiliar syntactical motifs. But as you get more familiar with that kind of syntax, you'll find it natural, and would be surprised if, say, it worked for regular objects but not in imports. When I picked up Rust, for example, I found myself right at home with it (same for the pattern-matching assignment stuff, which feels very similar to Clojure's). As for errors, you'd get the same error as in the desugared version: ptint is not a property on the object it's pulling apart.
  - 4y ago
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Isn't this exactly what CommonJS does/did?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    No, you're thinking of `destructuring`. CommonJS was "just" a common format for defining/importing modules in a NodeJS environment (via `module.exports` and `require`), eventually being used for packaging frontend "applications" as well, popularized by Browserify. To expand, the following was common before destructuring but with CommonJS: var some_func= require('some_module').some_func Which, as you know, would probably usually be done like this today, where we have destructuring: let {some_func} = require('some_module')
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  This is bog standard javascript these days.
- Gehinnn 4y ago
  This Syntax has the flaw that autocomplete cannot assist you before the from import clause has been added...
odedbend 4y ago
What is the performance of this language? Does its performance resemble that of any popular language?
Taywee 4y ago
Pretty interesting. I'm a professional user of Lua, and while I love it, I really get frustrated at a lot of aspects of it, especially how loose the typing is. I've long wished there were more strongly typed alternatives, but just nothing compares to the performance, stability, and quality of documentation of Lua. I'm not sure how I would embed this in a non-Zig project, though.
- brrrrrm 4y ago
  There’s a C embed example in the examples folder
  - Taywee 4y ago
    Nice, thanks. Looks pretty reasonable, but I'd really have to learn some zig myself to be fully comfortable using it, I think.
- ftransformer 4y ago
  Have you heard of Teal (https://github.com/teal-language/tl https://github.com/teal-language/tl)? It's like typescript for Lua made by Hisham. It also has the concept of declaration files so you can import (and type) existing Lua modules if needed.
  - Taywee 4y ago
    I haven't, but I might have to do a lot of work to get it working, as my typical use of Lua is deeply embedded and customized, and doesn't allow any filesystem access. I will definitely look into that, though, thank you. The only real Lua dialect I'm familiar with in that area is Moonscript.
    - MrOwnPut 4y ago
      There's many different approaches to typed Lua: - https://luau-lang.org https://luau-lang.org (interpreted / sandboxed) - https://terralang.org https://terralang.org (JIT interpreted) - https://nelua.io https://nelua.io (Lua -> C) - https://typescripttolua.github.io/ https://typescripttolua.github.io/ (TS -> Lua) - https://github.com/teal-language/tl https://github.com/teal-language/tl (Teal -> Lua) - https://github.com/sumneko/lua-language-server https://github.com/sumneko/lua-language-server (IDE only typing) With minimum effort you can get a lot of benefit from using Sumneko's Lua language server.
latch 4y ago
Somewhat related is yesterday's post about the Cyber programming language, also built on Zig and also embeddable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553236 (Not affiliated with either, just can be easy to miss stories on here sometimes, and I figured anyone interesting in Bog might also be interested in Cyber)
- eatonphil 4y ago
  Looking at the two of them, both awesome projects, not a competition but here are a few things I noticed. Cyber seems to have pretty good documentation [0] (maybe Bog does too but I didn't find too much from the readme. For example, you can see Bog has a GC and its standard library supports JSON, but memory management and non-scalar data structures aren't mentioned in the Bog readme). Cyber also seems to be under more active development at the moment. https://github.com/vexu/bog/graphs/contributors https://github.com/vexu/bog/graphs/contributors https://github.com/fubark/cyber/graphs/contributors https://github.com/fubark/cyber/graphs/contributors [0] https://github.com/fubark/cyber/blob/master/docs/docs.md https://github.com/fubark/cyber/blob/master/docs/docs.md
IshKebab 4y ago
Thought this was statically typed for a moment... Shame. I don't think you need to call out strong typing. Who would make a weakly typed language in 2023?
- eatonphil 4y ago
  > Who would make a weakly typed language in 2023 Interactive programming and programming on data (e.g. SQL) both make sense to have weak typing to me. But yeah I did misread strong typing in this as static typing. Thanks for calling that out.
sitkack 4y ago
Neat! Looks like a LuPyrby language.
dom96 4y ago
Interesting to see so many languages implemented in Zig pop up suddenly.
moomin 4y ago
Is it my imagination or is the most embedded language in the world C# these days? Which doesn’t really look anything like a classic language designed for embedding.
- kbd 4y ago
  Embed the whole .NET runtime? Huh?
  - moomin 4y ago
    People literally do that all the time! Godot does it, Unity does it...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
detrites 4y ago
Love how this language is explained with code only.
- dawsoneliasen 4y ago
  Is it just me or is that a terrible “hello world”? I get that they’re trying to illustrate a few features but the whole point of hello world is that it is the absolute most simple program. Why put the string world into a variable named world just to show that you can insert a variable into a string? It looks so confusing.
  - buttspelunker 4y ago
    I read that as "Yes, Bog does formatted strings", and appreciate the density.
    - layer8 4y ago
      The purpose of a Hello World, however, is not to showcase language features, it’s to provide a minimal program that produces output, to test that your dev environment is working properly, and for you to learn how to operate it. Adding any unnecessary complications to it only adds further sources of error.
      - bsaul 4y ago
        Do you think real people will get confused and think the only way to write hello world in bog is using a variable ? Or do you think most people will automatically adjust and think "hello world in itself doesn't show much, so the author decided to include something more informative and keep call that hello world" ?
        layer8 4y ago
        I think he shouldn‘t have called it a Hello World if its purpose is to showcase a language feature instead of serving as an actual Hello World.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
boxed 4y ago
It's a pity people don't know the history of the comma in python syntax, and thus think it's totally unnecessary (in a CS sense it is)...
- sly010 4y ago
  You mean the colon?
  - boxed 4y ago
    ugh, yes, I mean the colon
girvo 4y ago
So this is from my particular bias, but any language that touts itself as embedded, I really want to understand it's memory allocation model and approach! I see it's built on Zig, but does it support custom allocators within Bog itself? I'd love to use embeddable languages like this in embedded firmware, but a lot of them have issues with heap fragmentation when actually used in-anger, I've found. Aside from my biased nitpick, it looks pretty neat!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Titan2189 4y ago
Do they offer it in multiple versions, the most common one being called "standard"?

189 points by tsujp 4y ago

samsquire 4y ago

I am glad to see coroutines. How are coroutines scheduled? Can suspend return a value?

timeon 4y ago

Can match return value? It is not clear from the example since it has many duplicated print functions instead.

JonChesterfield 4y ago

Thank you for posting this. > let {print} = import "std.io" An idea obvious in hindsight that I hadn't thought before - if import returns an environment and let can destructure, then a pattern match can bind an explicit subset of that import. Something like: `(let {print read} (import io) (print (read)))` Further down I find essentially that example (with input instead of read) and destructuring assignment within function arguments: `let add = fn ((a,b)) a + b` though the grammar suggests that {} is initialisation and not a map/dict/hash/assoc/environment style thing, so you probably don't have `fn ({key value}) value + 4` or similar for taking maps apart as they are passed to a function. Thus I think import is special cased. The bytecode layer knows what maps are though, so maybe they're just missing from the syntax

benj111 4y ago
Something I hate about about c is that you don't know where the hell somefunc() came from. Some languages have foo.somefunc() which I think works quite well although iffooisrealllylong.function() is a risk. I suppose this gets you the best of both worlds. Although using let does seem a bit weird to me. It seems conceptually misleading.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  > Something I hate about about c is that you don't know where the hell somefunc() came from. I think you mean something you hate about not using an IDE with the language. One can do `from onoz import *` in python and Java to have a similar "wait, where did do_magic() come from?" experience, and then Scala will see your wildcard import and raise you implicit methods, which can die in a raging fire tornado
  - benj111 4y ago
    >I think you mean something you hate about not using an IDE with the language Well it's a 'feature' of the language so the criticism still stands. Ides could solve a lot of language warts but we still rightfully criticise the language for the warts. C's lack of memory safety could be solved by good programming practices, but we still criticise c for the lack of memory safety.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  This is true that there is no language feature to enforce this. But this can be worked around by enforcing naming functions with adequate prefixes, which is a very common approach, if not a best practice.
polotics 4y ago
Funny, I find this syntax very obtuse: it looks to me like "print" is being defined as, well, the print function, through a very roundabout name collision. What happens if there is a typo and the code says: let {ptint} =... What error message comes up?
- hmry 4y ago
  Well I can't test it in bog, but TypeScript allows exactly this syntax and it will give you an error like "Property ptint does not exist on type ..." One would imagine that let {print} = import "std.io" is equivalent to let print = (import "std.io").print
- icambron 4y ago
  "Obtuse" is maybe not the word you were looking for. Opaque perhaps? This kind of destructuring syntax is common in many newish languages -- Rust, Clojure, newer flavors of JS, Typescript, etc -- and becomes second nature pretty quickly. What you're seeing is really two things: first that you can pull apart a map as part of assignment, and second that there's sugar to name the variable after the map key. In JS, you could write: const { foo: bar } = something And that's sugar for const bar = something.foo At the same time, JS many other languages have pervasive support for the idea that often you want the same name for a variable as the map key where you're going to use it. So, e.g. const mapOfFoo = { foo } is equivalent to const mapOfFoo = { foo: foo } Combining these things, you get: const { foo } = something Equivalent to const foo = something.foo i.e. the variable/property auto-aliasing works in the destructure too. When you consider that you are importing a big object with a bunch of fields and functions hung off of it, it becomes natural for that to work the same way: import { foo } from "someplace" I'd argue that it's not actually opaque, let alone obtuse; it's merely unfamiliar because it's (I'm guessing) a combination of unfamiliar syntactical motifs. But as you get more familiar with that kind of syntax, you'll find it natural, and would be surprised if, say, it worked for regular objects but not in imports. When I picked up Rust, for example, I found myself right at home with it (same for the pattern-matching assignment stuff, which feels very similar to Clojure's). As for errors, you'd get the same error as in the desugared version: ptint is not a property on the object it's pulling apart.
- 4y ago
ricardobeat 4y ago
Isn't this exactly what CommonJS does/did?
- capableweb 4y ago
  No, you're thinking of `destructuring`. CommonJS was "just" a common format for defining/importing modules in a NodeJS environment (via `module.exports` and `require`), eventually being used for packaging frontend "applications" as well, popularized by Browserify. To expand, the following was common before destructuring but with CommonJS: var some_func= require('some_module').some_func Which, as you know, would probably usually be done like this today, where we have destructuring: let {some_func} = require('some_module')
jeremyjh 4y ago
This is bog standard javascript these days.
Gehinnn 4y ago
This Syntax has the flaw that autocomplete cannot assist you before the from import clause has been added...

odedbend 4y ago

What is the performance of this language? Does its performance resemble that of any popular language?

Taywee 4y ago

Pretty interesting. I'm a professional user of Lua, and while I love it, I really get frustrated at a lot of aspects of it, especially how loose the typing is. I've long wished there were more strongly typed alternatives, but just nothing compares to the performance, stability, and quality of documentation of Lua. I'm not sure how I would embed this in a non-Zig project, though.

brrrrrm 4y ago
There’s a C embed example in the examples folder
- Taywee 4y ago
  Nice, thanks. Looks pretty reasonable, but I'd really have to learn some zig myself to be fully comfortable using it, I think.
ftransformer 4y ago
Have you heard of Teal (https://github.com/teal-language/tl https://github.com/teal-language/tl)? It's like typescript for Lua made by Hisham. It also has the concept of declaration files so you can import (and type) existing Lua modules if needed.
- Taywee 4y ago
  I haven't, but I might have to do a lot of work to get it working, as my typical use of Lua is deeply embedded and customized, and doesn't allow any filesystem access. I will definitely look into that, though, thank you. The only real Lua dialect I'm familiar with in that area is Moonscript.
  - MrOwnPut 4y ago
    There's many different approaches to typed Lua: - https://luau-lang.org https://luau-lang.org (interpreted / sandboxed) - https://terralang.org https://terralang.org (JIT interpreted) - https://nelua.io https://nelua.io (Lua -> C) - https://typescripttolua.github.io/ https://typescripttolua.github.io/ (TS -> Lua) - https://github.com/teal-language/tl https://github.com/teal-language/tl (Teal -> Lua) - https://github.com/sumneko/lua-language-server https://github.com/sumneko/lua-language-server (IDE only typing) With minimum effort you can get a lot of benefit from using Sumneko's Lua language server.

latch 4y ago

Somewhat related is yesterday's post about the Cyber programming language, also built on Zig and also embeddable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553236 (Not affiliated with either, just can be easy to miss stories on here sometimes, and I figured anyone interesting in Bog might also be interested in Cyber)

eatonphil 4y ago
Looking at the two of them, both awesome projects, not a competition but here are a few things I noticed. Cyber seems to have pretty good documentation [0] (maybe Bog does too but I didn't find too much from the readme. For example, you can see Bog has a GC and its standard library supports JSON, but memory management and non-scalar data structures aren't mentioned in the Bog readme). Cyber also seems to be under more active development at the moment. https://github.com/vexu/bog/graphs/contributors https://github.com/vexu/bog/graphs/contributors https://github.com/fubark/cyber/graphs/contributors https://github.com/fubark/cyber/graphs/contributors [0] https://github.com/fubark/cyber/blob/master/docs/docs.md https://github.com/fubark/cyber/blob/master/docs/docs.md

IshKebab 4y ago

Thought this was statically typed for a moment... Shame. I don't think you need to call out strong typing. Who would make a weakly typed language in 2023?

eatonphil 4y ago
> Who would make a weakly typed language in 2023 Interactive programming and programming on data (e.g. SQL) both make sense to have weak typing to me. But yeah I did misread strong typing in this as static typing. Thanks for calling that out.

sitkack 4y ago

Neat! Looks like a LuPyrby language.

dom96 4y ago

Interesting to see so many languages implemented in Zig pop up suddenly.

moomin 4y ago

Is it my imagination or is the most embedded language in the world C# these days? Which doesn’t really look anything like a classic language designed for embedding.

kbd 4y ago
Embed the whole .NET runtime? Huh?
- moomin 4y ago
  People literally do that all the time! Godot does it, Unity does it...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

detrites 4y ago

Love how this language is explained with code only.

dawsoneliasen 4y ago
Is it just me or is that a terrible “hello world”? I get that they’re trying to illustrate a few features but the whole point of hello world is that it is the absolute most simple program. Why put the string world into a variable named world just to show that you can insert a variable into a string? It looks so confusing.
- buttspelunker 4y ago
  I read that as "Yes, Bog does formatted strings", and appreciate the density.
  - layer8 4y ago
    The purpose of a Hello World, however, is not to showcase language features, it’s to provide a minimal program that produces output, to test that your dev environment is working properly, and for you to learn how to operate it. Adding any unnecessary complications to it only adds further sources of error.
    - bsaul 4y ago
      Do you think real people will get confused and think the only way to write hello world in bog is using a variable ? Or do you think most people will automatically adjust and think "hello world in itself doesn't show much, so the author decided to include something more informative and keep call that hello world" ?
      - layer8 4y ago
        I think he shouldn‘t have called it a Hello World if its purpose is to showcase a language feature instead of serving as an actual Hello World.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

boxed 4y ago

It's a pity people don't know the history of the comma in python syntax, and thus think it's totally unnecessary (in a CS sense it is)...

sly010 4y ago
You mean the colon?
- boxed 4y ago
  ugh, yes, I mean the colon

girvo 4y ago

So this is from my particular bias, but any language that touts itself as embedded, I really want to understand it's memory allocation model and approach! I see it's built on Zig, but does it support custom allocators within Bog itself? I'd love to use embeddable languages like this in embedded firmware, but a lot of them have issues with heap fragmentation when actually used in-anger, I've found. Aside from my biased nitpick, it looks pretty neat!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Titan2189 4y ago

Do they offer it in multiple versions, the most common one being called "standard"?