5 ms·
Cyberscript
- als0 2mo agoSeems to be in the same category as Lua. Can a PL nerd explain what's different about it?
- eterm 2mo agoThe benchmarking seems a little bit suspect. It links to the bench.cy, but nothing explains how the others were measured. It seems that they're including some start-up time in some that dominates, but not explaining whether it's realistic to be needing to spend that.
- tosti 2mo agoMy gripe with new languages like this is that strings are always UTF-8 and that makes it needlessly difficult to parse HTTP headers correctly. This has led to vulnerabilities in the past.
- bflesch 2mo agoI agree. At this point scripting languages should have native support for string subtypes with custom charsets (ascii/utf16) or just regexp-defined or even ENUM()'erated values. IIRC historically on Windows, a string was UTF16, on unix it was ASCII; nowadays everywhere it's UTF8 without a way to specifically limit what goes into a string. For example UTF8 opens the door to homoglyph attacks and various other things (RTL, spaces), and a program should be able to force a string to be ASCII-only so that these classes of problems are ruled out.
- tosti 2mo agoThe NT kernel predates UTF8 by at least 3 years. It originally used UCS2, which covers the basic multilingual plane of the first unicode standard.
- Georgelemental 2mo agoHomoglyph attacks and RTL work just as well in UTF-16. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are different character encodings for the same character set (Unicode). That being said, Windows permits unpaired surrogates in its "UTF-16" strings, even though that is not actually valid UTF-16. Similarly, many Linux APIs accept arbitrary bytes, not just valid UTF-8.
- bflesch 2mo agoOf course. I was trying to say that it would be nice to limit certain variables to an ASCII charset, or ASCII+umlaut+accents without any of the 10k other UTF8 shenanigans.
- josephg 2mo agoI disagree. UTF-8 is the right default. Pure ASCII strings are rarely needed in modern software. Unless you know that you need ASCII, your strings should support unicode.
- tosti 2mo agoInternet Messages have been ASCII since Internet Messages.
- jcranmer 2mo agoMost internet protocols these days have shifted to UTF-8.
- tosti 2mo agoPerhaps so, and that's a good development imho. However, the most notorious of all, HTTP, has not afaik. Different encodings have been suggested including UTF-8. I'm not entirely sure why those proposals weren't implemented, but the dot-com bubble at the time might've had something to do with it.
- josephg 2mo agoTrue, but humans have been speaking non English languages since humans.
- tosti 2mo agoThe first networked computers predate unicode by several decades. Back then, the word length could be 8 but not neccesarily. All sorts of different encodings existed and a given common standard wasn't yet agreed upon It's not like internet standards don't know there are other languages, it's just that they documented how things were done at the time. Some legacy has remained ever since.
- josephg 2mo agoSure, but most code doesn't interact with raw packets. Legacy, ascii-only internet standards probably make up much less than 1% of new lines of code written today. Programming languages should support this use case. But not at the expense of the other 99% of software. Unicode-aware strings are the right choice for 99% of code. The last 1% should be a special case.
- SchizoDuckie 2mo agoThis is by far the most stupid name for a new language imaginable. Shortening it to "cyber" on the landing page too.. When will devs learn that being able to search for a term on the open internet without having it polluted by normal language is kind of important
- tjpnz 2mo agoIn the 90s/2000s people also used to shorten cybersex to cyber. I guess if they wanted to have fun with it they could add a "Wanna Cyber?" in place of the usual "Try <x>".
- josephg 2mo agoIt drove me nuts in the cryptocurrency boom that people shortened cryptocurrency to "crypto". As in, "I'm into crypto" or "I work in crypto". Cryptography is much older than bitcoin.
- freedomben 2mo agoI even had someone submit a resume that listed crypto as one of their skills. When I asked basic questions it quickly became clear they were talking about cryptocurrencies lol
- duskwuff 2mo agoAnd cryptosporidium (a type of bacteria which causes diarrhea) is also often abbreviated as "crypto". Not that there's much risk of confusion in CVs, but it does lead to some amusing lines like "preventing and controlling crypto", "symptoms of crypto", etc (e.g. at https://www.cdc.gov/cryptosporidium/prevention/preventing-and-controlling-crypto-childcare-facilities.html https://www.cdc.gov/cryptosporidium/prevention/preventing-an...).
- ModernMech 2mo ago"I put on my robe and wizard hat"
- Altern4tiveAcc 2mo agoIt would be nice if the examples included an integration with an existing game engine. Game scripting is a very common use case for those languages.
- yomismoaqui 2mo ago2022-2023 on the bottom of the main page, last release from 2023 & most recent commit from 8 months ago... seems almost dead to me
- darek 2mo agoYes, it was very promising, but unfortunately abandoned. And yeah, the name was bad too. But it doesn't matter. Lua/Luau is still the only serious language in this field, which is a pity.
- alexmuresan 2mo agoInteresting concept I guess. But the website reads like poorly AI generated code. No information as to what the grey and orange bars mean, overlapping text and such.
- derdi 2mo ago"Showing script time (orange), load time (gray), and peak memory usage."
- philipwhiuk 2mo agoGreat you came up with a compiler and some syntax. What libraries exist. What's package management system. How does it interop with existing code? Is there a JSON parser, an XML parser? Crypto algorithms? Database drivers? People who invent languages from scratch inherit the technical debt of recreating the entire software ecosystem. It looks like they are just pulling from the internet at the top of source files: `use rl 'https://mycdn.com/raylib https://mycdn.com/raylib'` Good luck with securing that. At least JavaScript has the sense to put it all in a single config file.
- ericpauley 2mo agoI think (outside hobbies) new programming language development is basically dead at this point. The major use cases have been filled, and there are more forces than ever towards using a battle-tested language with a massive ecosystem. Further, less and less code is being written or read by humans so the actual language ergonomics matter less than ever to those who would fund new language creation.
- white_dragon88 2mo ago[dead]
- ModernMech 2mo agoThe major use cases have not been filled, only the major corporate use cases. That doesn't mean there aren't still major gaps to be filled now, or that the current use cases won't evolve in the future. This talk argues there are many purposes for formal languages other than programming: https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-81cc802f5f6e https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-... So it may be true that "programming language" development is done, but there are many more applications for formal languages than just writing apps and websites and such. Moreover, it may be true that less code as a proportion of all code is being written or read by humans. But more humans today are reading and writing code than ever before. So the ability to express unambiguous ideas to agents using formal langauges is more important than ever, even if people are only reading/writing a small proportion of all code. Similarly, it's not true that because agents will be reading / writing code that language ergonomics do not matter. Agents have resource restrictions like token budgets, and they are also trained using human knowledge and conventions. Ergonomics apply to agents just as they do humans; languages which are verbose require more tokens to write, languages that can be verified are more useful in agentic loops, languages with live compiler introspection and interpreters can give fast results to agents etc. So I hold exactly the opposite view: it's not clear to me why languages built 30 years ago in a world where the Internet barely existed would be accidentally ideal for AI agents in 2026 to the pint we can say the whole field is solved for good (and no, I don't think the amount of training data on those languages seals the fate because that status is ephemeral and also it's not clear training on one language corpus isn't transferrable to other languages).
- tln 2mo agoThere's a lot to the language. Python and Rust vibes. Written in Zig. Seems to have lost steam. I wonder what happened
- boobsbr 2mo agoLooks like it's safer to stick to Lua and use LuaJIT.
- shevy-java 2mo agoLooks cleaner than lua. Unfortunately I think new programming languages kind of need to demonstrate first that they are really viable. So many new languages struggled to retain momentum, such as Io by Steve Dekorte; and some more examples (it is just one semi-random example of many more).
- qainsights 2mo agoLast release 2 years ago.