13 ms·

Nimrod: C + Macros + GC

211 points by norswap 13y ago

stesch 13y ago
I hate that this language looks so good. Fast benchmarks, good library, readable code, documentation. I don't want to learn another language! Now I have to …
JulianMorrison 13y ago
They ported the Erlang scheduler model to a C based language, nice.
jaytaylor 13y ago
I wonder what other wonderful languages I've never heard of. Really, please share!
- iso-8859-1 13y ago
  MetaML, a language with as many levels of macros as you'd like: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~taha/publications/journal/tcs00.pdf http://www.cs.rice.edu/~taha/publications/journal/tcs00.pdf (implementation as MetaOcaml)
- zem 13y ago
  if you're looking for interesting systems languages, clay looks good too: http://claylabs.com/clay/ http://claylabs.com/clay/
- evincarofautumn 13y ago
  Kitten, a statically typed, globally type-inferred, GC-less functional stack language, with opt-in layout-based syntax and an effect system to separate pure and impure operations. Disclaimer: I wrote this; it’s nowhere near complete, but not bad to play around with. We’re working toward a release in a few weeks, to include some missing language features and a new x86_64 runtime. https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten http://kittenlang.org/ http://kittenlang.org/
  - tomp 13y ago
    Can I ask you one thing: why did you decide to write a stack-based programming language? I'm really curious, as I personally see nothing good with them. The same kind of non-mathematical syntax as LISP (`1 2 +` as opposed to `+ 1 2`), without any of the goodness (code is data).
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Seriously? Ever heard about this Forth thing?
    - evincarofautumn 13y ago
      In Factor, code is data. Remember, though, that there are many sources of goodness in a language. As for your actual question, I decided to write a stack-based language because: • They can be implemented very efficiently on real hardware. The stack-based VM is well established as an implementation technique for non–stack-based languages. • Like in Lisp, the simple structure makes them suitable for useful visualisations beyond the program text. Static typing creates even more cool possibilities for such analysis. • There is fertile ground for new research, and applying existing theory to these languages for the first time—particularly type and effect systems. • It’s just a lot of fun. :)
      - tomp 13y ago
        I agree with all of those, to me is just seems like transformation into stack-based language should be made as part of the compilation process, not written down by the programmer. Maybe it's just me, I totally admit that I'm not used to thinking in concatenative languages as I've never used one, but mathematics, with named variables and control- and data-flow denoted by functions or sequential lines of operations, seems the most natural notation to read, write and think in.
        evincarofautumn 13y ago
        I totally understand. In fact, Kitten has named variables for that reason. You can write code that looks imperative, expressiony, or dataflowy, according to taste. Here’s a silly example: // Implicitly thread state between functions. def promptInt: ": " cat prompt readInt fromSome // Write stacky code if you want. def squareDiff: - dup * // Use locals as much as you need to. "x0" promptInt ->x0 "y0" promptInt ->y0 "x" promptInt ->x "y" promptInt ->y x0 x squareDiff ->a y0 y squareDiff ->b a b + sayInt
- InAnEmergency 13y ago
  You may be interested in the Fledgling Languages List: http://fll.presidentbeef.com/ http://fll.presidentbeef.com/
- copx 13y ago
  Some of my relatively obscure favorites: Io: http://iolanguage.org/ http://iolanguage.org/ Dylan: http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/ Euphoria: http://www.rapideuphoria.com/ http://www.rapideuphoria.com/
  - zem 13y ago
    i've always felt that had i discovered euphoria earlier in my programming life, i would have really liked it. these days i'd miss all the features more recent languages have borrowed from lisp and/or ml, but it would have been an awesome second or third language (after basic and c).
    - copx 13y ago
      I discovered Euphoria back in the DOS days when it was still commercial. I agree that it seems a little dated these days but I still fondly remember it. Also it is still a great language for non-professional programmers and still has an active community there. Note the recently updated SDL2, SFML2, and Allegro bindings for example.
- doublec 13y ago
  For an interesting systems programming language try ATS [1]. It's an ML style functional programming language with dependent types, linear types, macros, generics and compiles to C giving reasonable portability. [1] http://www.ats-lang.org/ http://www.ats-lang.org/
- epsylon 13y ago
  Check out fogus' lists of "Perlis languages": http://blog.fogus.me/2011/08/14/perlis-languages/ http://blog.fogus.me/2011/08/14/perlis-languages/ http://blog.fogus.me/2011/10/18/programming-language-development-the-past-5-years/ http://blog.fogus.me/2011/10/18/programming-language-develop...
cju 13y ago
As anyone tried it for embedded code on microcontrollers ? It looks usable for soft realtime, almost keeping speed and control of C and adding ease (and fun) of coding. GC is tunable and there are compilation options for embedded systems (http://nimrod-code.org/nimrodc.html#nimrod-for-embedded-systems http://nimrod-code.org/nimrodc.html#nimrod-for-embedded-syst...).
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  I haven't tried this, but I see that the Nimrod 0.9.0 release notes (from about a year ago) include this item: > The stdlib can now be avoided to a point where C code generation for 16bit micro controllers is feasible.
ics 13y ago
> The Nimrod Compiler can also generate C++ or Objective C for easier interfacing. This really is an inconvenient time for the weekend to be ending.
mynegation 13y ago
This is the closest to my ideal language I've ever seen. Elegant and expressive syntax of Python, statically typed with automatic type inference, compiled to native code, garbage collected, macros, AST manipulation, very comprehensive "batteries included" standard library. Definitely worth a closer look!
buster 13y ago
Just when i started reading tutorials about Rust this comes up... Looks nice, but does it also have concurrency built in (Rust tasks, Erlangs processes, message passing, etc.)?
- lambda 13y ago
  From the second paragraph on the linked page: > Beneath a nice infix/indentation based syntax with a powerful (AST based, hygienic) macro system lies a semantic model that supports a soft realtime GC on thread local heaps. Asynchronous message passing is used between threads, so no "stop the world" mechanism is necessary.
  - buster 13y ago
    Yes, so not. I've found the actor module, but it's based on threads so no "lightweigth" and not as powerful as the networked, lightweight erlang processes. I'd really love to see that in a new language, especially since Rust and Nimrod are the first ones in a while i really like from the syntax point of view..
    - marshray 13y ago
      Erlang seems to pay a small performance penalty for that ability though. The VM is not allowed to run more than a few thousand instructions without checking for a signal to task switch. But if that kind of guaranteed cooperation isn't needed, I'd expect that lightweight threads could be added to a language like this in a straightforward way.
atrilumen 13y ago
I've been tempted by this one several times. I may have to play around with it and SDL2. One thing that gets me, though, is the var keyword in a statically typed language. Why say "var thing: string" instead of "string thing"? I think that consistent, explicit declaration of types is much cleaner and easier to read than this recurring mixture of type inference and annotation.
- eropple 13y ago
  In this language, I don't think it makes sense. (Then again, I think little of this language makes sense. Neat hack, but still in the "if I want GC I'll use the JVM" bucket that a lot of these fall into.) In something like Scala, you can end up with some fairly hairy eyesores of variable declarations and the type is often not that important when you and everyone else have the ability to hover over a variable name and see the computed type immediately. Wouldn't work for a vim-driven language, but works well in an IDE.
- twotwotwo 13y ago
  One point in favor of inference is that it gives you less to read, and what the compiler can infer, the reader usually can, too. On the other side, you could say you shouldn't have to infer while you read and having types in front of you reduces cognitive load. I bet the folks building these languages with inference probably and wouldn't mind having fewer annotations (and being more consistent, in a sense) if they could. It's just that to get rid of some of these annotations you have to make deep changes to the language, like OCaml's polymorphic functions, and that may be inconsistent with their design goals or just hard. Obviously folks won't agree on whether inference is a great thing or not. Whatever one's used to usually seems easier to read. I've worked more in dynamically typed langauges than statically, and (so) languages with inference feel more like home.
- zahary 13y ago
  Well, Nimrod is built around type-infernce. Most of the time you should just say "var thing = somethingStringy()".
C1D 13y ago
I know exactly what I'm going to be doing next week!
continuations 13y ago
This looks good. However according to the web framework benchmark its performance looks pretty underwhelming, below that of Python and Ruby: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7&test=json http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7... Has anyone used this in production?
- dom96 13y ago
  Hey, guy behind Jester here (The web framework being benchmarked). Please don't let these results deter you from Nimrod. Not only is Jester alpha-grade software, but when I submitted these benchmarks I did not have much time to properly utilize Nimrod's concurrency features (I was in the middle of exams). My first submission was not parallel at all and I quickly corrected it so that multiple processes were simply spawned (with no regard to the amount of CPU cores) which is definitely not ideal and the results show this. So please don't blame Nimrod for this, blame me instead. For better evidence of Nimrod's power take a look at these benchmarks: http://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round-two-parallel-go-rust-d-scala-and-nimrod/ http://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round-tw...
  - bhauer 13y ago
    Hi dom96. Thanks again for contributing the Jester tests! I hope you get some time to continue your work on Jester. We'd like to have Nimrod represented properly in the results. Are there other Nimrod web frameworks (and importantly, domain experts with those frameworks) that could be contributed for Round 7?
    - dom96 13y ago
      No problem! Thanks for accepting my contributions! I hope so too, but maybe with Nimrod's recent surge in popularity someone can give me a hand :) Sadly, I am not aware of any other web frameworks. Speaking of Round 7, do you have an ETA for it?
      - bhauer 13y ago
polskibus 13y ago
Can someone explain why is this so much better than c++?
- pmb 13y ago
  Nobody can explain to a dedicated C++ programmer why a new language is better than C++. I have tried for more than a decade many times and all I have ever gotten across has apparently been a "wah wah wah" noise like the adults in Peanuts. Because C++ is multi-paradigm, all paradigms are possible within it (although they may not be syntactically easy or have reasonable error messages, etc etc). Therefore, either C++ is the obviously the best language (to its partisans) or it is a hellish agglomeration of mutually contradictory confusing crap that takes years to begin to understand (to its detractors). Unfortunately, those two camps each find their position obvious, and seem to be unable to communicate with one another. std::cout << "This does what??!" << endl;
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    The problem is that many older timers, like myself, that know C++ since its origins are quite comfortable with it, despite all its warts. Nowadays I spend my consulting work in Java and .NET land, and actually I favour the Wirth family of languages over C and C++. However, C and C++ have a big tooling support in the industry, and history shows system programming languages are only successful when backed by OS vendors.
    - pcunite 13y ago
      Exactly, writing code in the same language as the OS (and their source examples) is generally the best approach ... based on what you're doing of course.
  - polskibus 13y ago
    I was hoping for something more constructive, like "these 3 Nimrod features address programming problems much better than c++". I skimmed through tutorial ( both parts) and failed to see anything extraordinary.
  - 13y ago
sidww2 13y ago
What would be really killer is if it could have bindings to Java. Then one could take advantage of the JVM being present everywhere w/o having to do a separate compilation for every platform.
- mmfZ4e4OqQ7RRwP 13y ago
  Note that nimrod compiles to C, and your JVM may be implemented in C or C++. So for the measly gain of not having to run a command on the destination platform (nimrod c name.nim) you are bringing in the runtime performance drawbacks of the whole JVM and requiring a further layer of abstraction. Plus bytecode doesn't mean a program will run at all, look at all the java programs which run on android without modification, oh, wait...
  - sidww2 13y ago
    I'm in CompBio and the sense I get is that it's a lot easier to get someone to try your tool if all you have to do is provide them the jar which they just have to click on and it runs. Whereas with compilation, you first have to make sure you have all the platforms covered and then force the potential user to select the right executable for the platform.
    - burntsushi 13y ago
      Just distribute the source. I'm in CompBio too and actively avoid software distributed as just jar files. Give me the source so I can fix your (probably) broken software. (Yes, I have a low opinion of the quality of software in my field.)
      - 616c 13y ago
        Regardless of field, I see this as the right attitude. You would be surprised how many eyerolls I get, even in IT!
      - sidww2 13y ago
        I don't think forcing potential users to compile a program is going lower the barrier much. A lot of the users could be biologists and they would likely not know how to compile the source. I do agree that the software should be open source.
xaa 13y ago
This reminds me a lot of D. It's low-level, GCed, essentially intended as a nicer C/C++. But I think it suffers from the same fatal flaw that D does: you have to semi-manually translate C headers that you want to use. Like D, it provides an automated tool to help, but the translated headers will inevitably lag their original counterparts. As another commenter below noted, the var and proc thing is also redundant and annoying. However, the ability to compile to C (and, as a result, to easily cross-compile) is really nice.
- qznc 13y ago
  Is "fatal flaw" the right term? I do not see any way to fix this. Even including a full C parser and preprocessor into the D/Nimrod compiler would not solve the problem.
  - WalterBright 13y ago
    Since I've written a C compiler, I know how to read C source files. The problem with automated conversion is you can do 90% of the job without any trouble, but there's that darned last 10% that doesn't map to D without some human decision making. For example, there are the preprocessor macros. Most are straightforward, but it seems most C .h files succumb to the temptation at some point to do something wacky with them.
    - Araq 13y ago
      This is very true; however c2nim distinguishes between #def and #define for this reason and this helps a lot. #def means c2nim needs to expand the macro, #define means it's some macro that should be translated into a Nimrod template. Coming up with heuristics to do this #def vs #define distinction automatically seems to be quite easy and might be implemented in a later version of c2nim.
      - WalterBright 13y ago
        #def, according to https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/blob/master/doc/c2nim.txt https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/blob/master/doc/c2nim.txt, requires modification of the C header files. I don't think this is a practical option, for example, they might be system .h files.
Scramblejams 13y ago
Now if only it would offer immutability and lightweight threads (like Erlang's processes)...
dom96 13y ago
What's really amazing about this language is that until only recently it has been developed solely by one person in his spare time no less. It is competing with the likes of Rust and Go which have pretty big companies behind them.
- srean 13y ago
  There are quite a few very performant languages like that. I would like to list two, ATS and Felix. I commented on Felix today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274322 A good HN day for language enthusiasts.
wmobit 13y ago
Dear everyone, please stop using C as a compile target. Thanks.
- codygman 13y ago
  why?
  - copx 13y ago
    One good argument I can think of would be compile time. C compiles slowly compared to almost every other language not C++. And of course you get the C compile time on top of the compile to C time, so I expect the Nimrod compile chain to be quite slow. Doesn't mean that I am generally opposed to compiling to C, it's often a good trade-off.
    - winter_blue 13y ago
      A good solution to this is to go with a language like C-- (if you are too scared of LLVM).
- yoklov 13y ago
  Err, why? It's fairly easy, and you get so much for free: portability, compiler optimizations, easy use of C libraries, easy interfacing with other languages...
nwg 13y ago
There was something similar to this about two weeks ago here, with vars and lambdas in c99. It was less of a full blown language and more just functions and preprocessor definitions to be used in C. I am having trouble finding it now. Does anyone remember the name of this other project? I'd like to check these both out.
- Doji 13y ago
  https://github.com/orangeduck/libCello https://github.com/orangeduck/libCello
andrewflnr 13y ago
On the Clay thread a while back, people liked my list of systems-oriented languages that I've been compiling for a while. I can't go a good copy-paste and edit job on my iPad, so I'll just link to the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6117456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6117456 . A bunch of other people came in with updates and other entries for the list. Included were of course Clay, Nimrod, Rust, and D, but also Deca, BitC, ATS, Habit (a Haskell dialect), and others.
- Dewie 13y ago
  I don't know anything about systems languages, but it seems that there is a lot of effort getting put into C/C++ alternatives, and many bold efforts at that. But maybe that is just a historical bias, because so few remembers the failed (popularity vice) systems languages efforts of yesteryear?
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    I'm only 21, but I definitely get the impression things have picked up in that area in the last few years.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Before C became mainstream, Modula-2 and many Pascal dialects like Apple and Turbo Pascal could already fulfil the same role with better type safety and Go compile times in 16 bit systems. However they lacked the bundling to a commercial OS like UNIX, hence C grew in importance, because developers tend to use the languages supported by the OS vendors.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Symmetry 13y ago
I actually discovered this yesterday and spent Saturday morning learning about it. I really like most of the syntax, especially the "var/const/let" distinction together with "if/when". I'm sort of wish that Rust and Go would just copy that. The semantics seemed to be up to par with this generation of potential C replacements, but not any better than the others.
- dbaupp 13y ago
  Rust has let mut, let and static which seem to correspond fairly closely to var, let and const.
lobster_johnson 13y ago
Nimrod looks a lot like someone took Borland's ObjectPascal and removed the begin/end block semantics in favour of whitespace indentation. For example, they use the "var: type" syntax; the syntax for declaring classes is nearly identical; "case [value] of" is right out of Pascal, as is the "0..2" range syntax. They refer to "procedures" as opposed to functions. They even use naming conventions from ObjectPascal: "T" as a prefix for types (eg., TChannel), "P" for the Nimrod equivalent to pointers (eg., PChannel is a "ref TChannel"), "F" for class members. I would not be surprised if the author was an old Turbo Pascal/Delphi hand.
- smilekzs 13y ago
  On first sight it resembled Python, while a second look revealed lots of Pascal legacy... Really what's the deal-maker?
hetman 13y ago
Unfortunately the documentation still states that at this point I can choose either threads or a dynamically linked run time library. For an embedded system, static linking isn't much of an option because there are real memory constraints. It's a shame that a lot of these new languages focus on creating a really great language, but don't seem to give as much time to the practical usage of the language (for example, GHC did not support cross-compilation at all until very recently). Ironing some of those fundamental issues out before adding some of the fancier features could probably really boost interest in the language and programmer uptake.
dubcanada 13y ago
I wonder how good this would be as a game engine.
pilif 13y ago
Reading the tutorial is indeed very pleasant. I have to say however, that from such a new language I would ask for more correct string handling as opposed to the let-me-sidestep-encoding-issues-and-still-call-it-UTF8 that's going on. Defining characters as 8 bit is not quite correct (you will get char variables holding a fraction of a character), treating strings as arrays of characters by conversion also isn't (now you have an array of partial characters) and ignoring the encoding (just assuming UTF8) is a sure cause for annoying bugs - something the rest of the language goes great lengths to avoid. I've only read the tutorial so far. Maybe the library fixes some of the issues - we'll see. The thing is just that if you start adding metadata to your sting types (they do encode the length (in what? Characters? Partial characters? Bytes?)), then why not also at least add an encoding (to help programmers not to mix strings of different encodings)? Why do everything right and then weasel out when you get to strings? Sorry. I'm totally obsessive what string encodings is concerned :-)
- deckiedan 13y ago
  Sounds like you'd be a great person to join the team as chief string theorist. :-)
- qznc 13y ago
  I just stumbled over the way D handles this. The forum holds the discussion and reasoning, how D does it: http://forum.dlang.org/thread/uuevnvallcardcdjwikz@forum.dlang.org http://forum.dlang.org/thread/uuevnvallcardcdjwikz@forum.dla...
- Araq 13y ago
  Strings should be converted to UTF-8 as part of input validation. For proper input validation we have the taint mode already. Note that often a file does not include any information about the encoding, so you can only use heuristics.
ballard 13y ago
Ugh, the community is barely alive and it's an unwieldy collection of non-orthogonal constructs. Generics and a few whiz-bang features doesn't paper over the sins upon sins. I see this project cutting back features or dying under the weight of crushing unmaintainability. (sad.)
- coldtea 13y ago
  The above comment is content-free (at least argument wise). What are those "sins"? What are the non-orthogonal constructs, and how are they "non-orthogonal"? What's unwieldy about them? Seems mostly like pissing on somebody's work for the fun of it.
- commentzorro 13y ago
  >> ...unwieldy collection of non-orthogonal constructs... >> ...doesn't paper over the sins upon sins... Please elaborate. I didn't see any of that and honestly don't know what "non-orthogonal constructs" means. I'm no language design expert but would like to know what, to you, are the obvious deficiencies.
  - ballard 13y ago
    Non-orthogonality: Multiple features that accomplish nearly the same result in different ways. For a language maintainer, this is another piece that will have to be supported, troubleshooted and documented. The other problem for users is that it gives a sense of confusion and uncertainty (Paradox of Choice) about the correctness of a program that may lead to multiple refactorings that don't add any value. Also, more features require more learning and makes programs harder to understand. The goals of any good language should be correctness and understandability. Arguably, Python learned the lessons from Perl. But there are many different languages, and some are better in different instances. What Nimrod turns into will be hard to say, but Go and Erlang need more competition.
pekk 13y ago
I don't understand why Nimrod has to mostly look like Python, but then make all kinds of innovations in syntax and formatting which have nothing to do with performance.
- smilekzs 13y ago
  And I find these "innovation" mostly solving problems that didn't have to exist.
WayneDB 13y ago
My favorite example from their tutorial: if yes("Should I delete all your important files?"): echo("I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.") else: echo("I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.")

211 points by norswap 13y ago

I hate that this language looks so good. Fast benchmarks, good library, readable code, documentation. I don't want to learn another language! Now I have to …

JulianMorrison 13y ago

They ported the Erlang scheduler model to a C based language, nice.

jaytaylor 13y ago

I wonder what other wonderful languages I've never heard of. Really, please share!

iso-8859-1 13y ago
MetaML, a language with as many levels of macros as you'd like: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~taha/publications/journal/tcs00.pdf http://www.cs.rice.edu/~taha/publications/journal/tcs00.pdf (implementation as MetaOcaml)
zem 13y ago
if you're looking for interesting systems languages, clay looks good too: http://claylabs.com/clay/ http://claylabs.com/clay/
evincarofautumn 13y ago
Kitten, a statically typed, globally type-inferred, GC-less functional stack language, with opt-in layout-based syntax and an effect system to separate pure and impure operations. Disclaimer: I wrote this; it’s nowhere near complete, but not bad to play around with. We’re working toward a release in a few weeks, to include some missing language features and a new x86_64 runtime. https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten http://kittenlang.org/ http://kittenlang.org/
- tomp 13y ago
  Can I ask you one thing: why did you decide to write a stack-based programming language? I'm really curious, as I personally see nothing good with them. The same kind of non-mathematical syntax as LISP (`1 2 +` as opposed to `+ 1 2`), without any of the goodness (code is data).
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Seriously? Ever heard about this Forth thing?
  - evincarofautumn 13y ago
    In Factor, code is data. Remember, though, that there are many sources of goodness in a language. As for your actual question, I decided to write a stack-based language because: • They can be implemented very efficiently on real hardware. The stack-based VM is well established as an implementation technique for non–stack-based languages. • Like in Lisp, the simple structure makes them suitable for useful visualisations beyond the program text. Static typing creates even more cool possibilities for such analysis. • There is fertile ground for new research, and applying existing theory to these languages for the first time—particularly type and effect systems. • It’s just a lot of fun. :)
    - tomp 13y ago
      I agree with all of those, to me is just seems like transformation into stack-based language should be made as part of the compilation process, not written down by the programmer. Maybe it's just me, I totally admit that I'm not used to thinking in concatenative languages as I've never used one, but mathematics, with named variables and control- and data-flow denoted by functions or sequential lines of operations, seems the most natural notation to read, write and think in.
      - evincarofautumn 13y ago
        I totally understand. In fact, Kitten has named variables for that reason. You can write code that looks imperative, expressiony, or dataflowy, according to taste. Here’s a silly example: // Implicitly thread state between functions. def promptInt: ": " cat prompt readInt fromSome // Write stacky code if you want. def squareDiff: - dup * // Use locals as much as you need to. "x0" promptInt ->x0 "y0" promptInt ->y0 "x" promptInt ->x "y" promptInt ->y x0 x squareDiff ->a y0 y squareDiff ->b a b + sayInt
InAnEmergency 13y ago
You may be interested in the Fledgling Languages List: http://fll.presidentbeef.com/ http://fll.presidentbeef.com/
copx 13y ago
Some of my relatively obscure favorites: Io: http://iolanguage.org/ http://iolanguage.org/ Dylan: http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/ Euphoria: http://www.rapideuphoria.com/ http://www.rapideuphoria.com/
- zem 13y ago
  i've always felt that had i discovered euphoria earlier in my programming life, i would have really liked it. these days i'd miss all the features more recent languages have borrowed from lisp and/or ml, but it would have been an awesome second or third language (after basic and c).
  - copx 13y ago
    I discovered Euphoria back in the DOS days when it was still commercial. I agree that it seems a little dated these days but I still fondly remember it. Also it is still a great language for non-professional programmers and still has an active community there. Note the recently updated SDL2, SFML2, and Allegro bindings for example.
doublec 13y ago
For an interesting systems programming language try ATS [1]. It's an ML style functional programming language with dependent types, linear types, macros, generics and compiles to C giving reasonable portability. [1] http://www.ats-lang.org/ http://www.ats-lang.org/
epsylon 13y ago
Check out fogus' lists of "Perlis languages": http://blog.fogus.me/2011/08/14/perlis-languages/ http://blog.fogus.me/2011/08/14/perlis-languages/ http://blog.fogus.me/2011/10/18/programming-language-development-the-past-5-years/ http://blog.fogus.me/2011/10/18/programming-language-develop...

cju 13y ago

As anyone tried it for embedded code on microcontrollers ? It looks usable for soft realtime, almost keeping speed and control of C and adding ease (and fun) of coding. GC is tunable and there are compilation options for embedded systems (http://nimrod-code.org/nimrodc.html#nimrod-for-embedded-systems http://nimrod-code.org/nimrodc.html#nimrod-for-embedded-syst...).

mwcampbell 13y ago
I haven't tried this, but I see that the Nimrod 0.9.0 release notes (from about a year ago) include this item: > The stdlib can now be avoided to a point where C code generation for 16bit micro controllers is feasible.

ics 13y ago

> The Nimrod Compiler can also generate C++ or Objective C for easier interfacing. This really is an inconvenient time for the weekend to be ending.

mynegation 13y ago

This is the closest to my ideal language I've ever seen. Elegant and expressive syntax of Python, statically typed with automatic type inference, compiled to native code, garbage collected, macros, AST manipulation, very comprehensive "batteries included" standard library. Definitely worth a closer look!

buster 13y ago

Just when i started reading tutorials about Rust this comes up... Looks nice, but does it also have concurrency built in (Rust tasks, Erlangs processes, message passing, etc.)?

lambda 13y ago
From the second paragraph on the linked page: > Beneath a nice infix/indentation based syntax with a powerful (AST based, hygienic) macro system lies a semantic model that supports a soft realtime GC on thread local heaps. Asynchronous message passing is used between threads, so no "stop the world" mechanism is necessary.
- buster 13y ago
  Yes, so not. I've found the actor module, but it's based on threads so no "lightweigth" and not as powerful as the networked, lightweight erlang processes. I'd really love to see that in a new language, especially since Rust and Nimrod are the first ones in a while i really like from the syntax point of view..
  - marshray 13y ago
    Erlang seems to pay a small performance penalty for that ability though. The VM is not allowed to run more than a few thousand instructions without checking for a signal to task switch. But if that kind of guaranteed cooperation isn't needed, I'd expect that lightweight threads could be added to a language like this in a straightforward way.

atrilumen 13y ago

I've been tempted by this one several times. I may have to play around with it and SDL2. One thing that gets me, though, is the var keyword in a statically typed language. Why say "var thing: string" instead of "string thing"? I think that consistent, explicit declaration of types is much cleaner and easier to read than this recurring mixture of type inference and annotation.

eropple 13y ago
In this language, I don't think it makes sense. (Then again, I think little of this language makes sense. Neat hack, but still in the "if I want GC I'll use the JVM" bucket that a lot of these fall into.) In something like Scala, you can end up with some fairly hairy eyesores of variable declarations and the type is often not that important when you and everyone else have the ability to hover over a variable name and see the computed type immediately. Wouldn't work for a vim-driven language, but works well in an IDE.
twotwotwo 13y ago
One point in favor of inference is that it gives you less to read, and what the compiler can infer, the reader usually can, too. On the other side, you could say you shouldn't have to infer while you read and having types in front of you reduces cognitive load. I bet the folks building these languages with inference probably and wouldn't mind having fewer annotations (and being more consistent, in a sense) if they could. It's just that to get rid of some of these annotations you have to make deep changes to the language, like OCaml's polymorphic functions, and that may be inconsistent with their design goals or just hard. Obviously folks won't agree on whether inference is a great thing or not. Whatever one's used to usually seems easier to read. I've worked more in dynamically typed langauges than statically, and (so) languages with inference feel more like home.
zahary 13y ago
Well, Nimrod is built around type-infernce. Most of the time you should just say "var thing = somethingStringy()".

C1D 13y ago

I know exactly what I'm going to be doing next week!

continuations 13y ago

This looks good. However according to the web framework benchmark its performance looks pretty underwhelming, below that of Python and Ruby: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7&test=json http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7... Has anyone used this in production?

dom96 13y ago
Hey, guy behind Jester here (The web framework being benchmarked). Please don't let these results deter you from Nimrod. Not only is Jester alpha-grade software, but when I submitted these benchmarks I did not have much time to properly utilize Nimrod's concurrency features (I was in the middle of exams). My first submission was not parallel at all and I quickly corrected it so that multiple processes were simply spawned (with no regard to the amount of CPU cores) which is definitely not ideal and the results show this. So please don't blame Nimrod for this, blame me instead. For better evidence of Nimrod's power take a look at these benchmarks: http://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round-two-parallel-go-rust-d-scala-and-nimrod/ http://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round-tw...
- bhauer 13y ago
  Hi dom96. Thanks again for contributing the Jester tests! I hope you get some time to continue your work on Jester. We'd like to have Nimrod represented properly in the results. Are there other Nimrod web frameworks (and importantly, domain experts with those frameworks) that could be contributed for Round 7?
  - dom96 13y ago
    No problem! Thanks for accepting my contributions! I hope so too, but maybe with Nimrod's recent surge in popularity someone can give me a hand :) Sadly, I am not aware of any other web frameworks. Speaking of Round 7, do you have an ETA for it?
    - bhauer 13y ago

polskibus 13y ago

Can someone explain why is this so much better than c++?

pmb 13y ago
Nobody can explain to a dedicated C++ programmer why a new language is better than C++. I have tried for more than a decade many times and all I have ever gotten across has apparently been a "wah wah wah" noise like the adults in Peanuts. Because C++ is multi-paradigm, all paradigms are possible within it (although they may not be syntactically easy or have reasonable error messages, etc etc). Therefore, either C++ is the obviously the best language (to its partisans) or it is a hellish agglomeration of mutually contradictory confusing crap that takes years to begin to understand (to its detractors). Unfortunately, those two camps each find their position obvious, and seem to be unable to communicate with one another. std::cout << "This does what??!" << endl;
- pjmlp 13y ago
  The problem is that many older timers, like myself, that know C++ since its origins are quite comfortable with it, despite all its warts. Nowadays I spend my consulting work in Java and .NET land, and actually I favour the Wirth family of languages over C and C++. However, C and C++ have a big tooling support in the industry, and history shows system programming languages are only successful when backed by OS vendors.
  - pcunite 13y ago
    Exactly, writing code in the same language as the OS (and their source examples) is generally the best approach ... based on what you're doing of course.
- polskibus 13y ago
  I was hoping for something more constructive, like "these 3 Nimrod features address programming problems much better than c++". I skimmed through tutorial ( both parts) and failed to see anything extraordinary.
- 13y ago

sidww2 13y ago

What would be really killer is if it could have bindings to Java. Then one could take advantage of the JVM being present everywhere w/o having to do a separate compilation for every platform.

mmfZ4e4OqQ7RRwP 13y ago
Note that nimrod compiles to C, and your JVM may be implemented in C or C++. So for the measly gain of not having to run a command on the destination platform (nimrod c name.nim) you are bringing in the runtime performance drawbacks of the whole JVM and requiring a further layer of abstraction. Plus bytecode doesn't mean a program will run at all, look at all the java programs which run on android without modification, oh, wait...
- sidww2 13y ago
  I'm in CompBio and the sense I get is that it's a lot easier to get someone to try your tool if all you have to do is provide them the jar which they just have to click on and it runs. Whereas with compilation, you first have to make sure you have all the platforms covered and then force the potential user to select the right executable for the platform.
  - burntsushi 13y ago
    Just distribute the source. I'm in CompBio too and actively avoid software distributed as just jar files. Give me the source so I can fix your (probably) broken software. (Yes, I have a low opinion of the quality of software in my field.)
    - 616c 13y ago
      Regardless of field, I see this as the right attitude. You would be surprised how many eyerolls I get, even in IT!
    - sidww2 13y ago
      I don't think forcing potential users to compile a program is going lower the barrier much. A lot of the users could be biologists and they would likely not know how to compile the source. I do agree that the software should be open source.

xaa 13y ago

This reminds me a lot of D. It's low-level, GCed, essentially intended as a nicer C/C++. But I think it suffers from the same fatal flaw that D does: you have to semi-manually translate C headers that you want to use. Like D, it provides an automated tool to help, but the translated headers will inevitably lag their original counterparts. As another commenter below noted, the var and proc thing is also redundant and annoying. However, the ability to compile to C (and, as a result, to easily cross-compile) is really nice.

qznc 13y ago
Is "fatal flaw" the right term? I do not see any way to fix this. Even including a full C parser and preprocessor into the D/Nimrod compiler would not solve the problem.
- WalterBright 13y ago
  Since I've written a C compiler, I know how to read C source files. The problem with automated conversion is you can do 90% of the job without any trouble, but there's that darned last 10% that doesn't map to D without some human decision making. For example, there are the preprocessor macros. Most are straightforward, but it seems most C .h files succumb to the temptation at some point to do something wacky with them.
  - Araq 13y ago
    This is very true; however c2nim distinguishes between #def and #define for this reason and this helps a lot. #def means c2nim needs to expand the macro, #define means it's some macro that should be translated into a Nimrod template. Coming up with heuristics to do this #def vs #define distinction automatically seems to be quite easy and might be implemented in a later version of c2nim.
    - WalterBright 13y ago
      #def, according to https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/blob/master/doc/c2nim.txt https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/blob/master/doc/c2nim.txt, requires modification of the C header files. I don't think this is a practical option, for example, they might be system .h files.

Scramblejams 13y ago

Now if only it would offer immutability and lightweight threads (like Erlang's processes)...

dom96 13y ago

What's really amazing about this language is that until only recently it has been developed solely by one person in his spare time no less. It is competing with the likes of Rust and Go which have pretty big companies behind them.

srean 13y ago
There are quite a few very performant languages like that. I would like to list two, ATS and Felix. I commented on Felix today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274322 A good HN day for language enthusiasts.

wmobit 13y ago

Dear everyone, please stop using C as a compile target. Thanks.

codygman 13y ago
why?
- copx 13y ago
  One good argument I can think of would be compile time. C compiles slowly compared to almost every other language not C++. And of course you get the C compile time on top of the compile to C time, so I expect the Nimrod compile chain to be quite slow. Doesn't mean that I am generally opposed to compiling to C, it's often a good trade-off.
  - winter_blue 13y ago
    A good solution to this is to go with a language like C-- (if you are too scared of LLVM).
yoklov 13y ago
Err, why? It's fairly easy, and you get so much for free: portability, compiler optimizations, easy use of C libraries, easy interfacing with other languages...

nwg 13y ago

There was something similar to this about two weeks ago here, with vars and lambdas in c99. It was less of a full blown language and more just functions and preprocessor definitions to be used in C. I am having trouble finding it now. Does anyone remember the name of this other project? I'd like to check these both out.

Doji 13y ago
https://github.com/orangeduck/libCello https://github.com/orangeduck/libCello

andrewflnr 13y ago

On the Clay thread a while back, people liked my list of systems-oriented languages that I've been compiling for a while. I can't go a good copy-paste and edit job on my iPad, so I'll just link to the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6117456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6117456 . A bunch of other people came in with updates and other entries for the list. Included were of course Clay, Nimrod, Rust, and D, but also Deca, BitC, ATS, Habit (a Haskell dialect), and others.

Dewie 13y ago
I don't know anything about systems languages, but it seems that there is a lot of effort getting put into C/C++ alternatives, and many bold efforts at that. But maybe that is just a historical bias, because so few remembers the failed (popularity vice) systems languages efforts of yesteryear?
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  I'm only 21, but I definitely get the impression things have picked up in that area in the last few years.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Before C became mainstream, Modula-2 and many Pascal dialects like Apple and Turbo Pascal could already fulfil the same role with better type safety and Go compile times in 16 bit systems. However they lacked the bundling to a commercial OS like UNIX, hence C grew in importance, because developers tend to use the languages supported by the OS vendors.

deleted 13y ago

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Symmetry 13y ago

I actually discovered this yesterday and spent Saturday morning learning about it. I really like most of the syntax, especially the "var/const/let" distinction together with "if/when". I'm sort of wish that Rust and Go would just copy that. The semantics seemed to be up to par with this generation of potential C replacements, but not any better than the others.

dbaupp 13y ago
Rust has let mut, let and static which seem to correspond fairly closely to var, let and const.

lobster_johnson 13y ago

Nimrod looks a lot like someone took Borland's ObjectPascal and removed the begin/end block semantics in favour of whitespace indentation. For example, they use the "var: type" syntax; the syntax for declaring classes is nearly identical; "case [value] of" is right out of Pascal, as is the "0..2" range syntax. They refer to "procedures" as opposed to functions. They even use naming conventions from ObjectPascal: "T" as a prefix for types (eg., TChannel), "P" for the Nimrod equivalent to pointers (eg., PChannel is a "ref TChannel"), "F" for class members. I would not be surprised if the author was an old Turbo Pascal/Delphi hand.

smilekzs 13y ago
On first sight it resembled Python, while a second look revealed lots of Pascal legacy... Really what's the deal-maker?

hetman 13y ago

Unfortunately the documentation still states that at this point I can choose either threads or a dynamically linked run time library. For an embedded system, static linking isn't much of an option because there are real memory constraints. It's a shame that a lot of these new languages focus on creating a really great language, but don't seem to give as much time to the practical usage of the language (for example, GHC did not support cross-compilation at all until very recently). Ironing some of those fundamental issues out before adding some of the fancier features could probably really boost interest in the language and programmer uptake.

dubcanada 13y ago

I wonder how good this would be as a game engine.

pilif 13y ago

Reading the tutorial is indeed very pleasant. I have to say however, that from such a new language I would ask for more correct string handling as opposed to the let-me-sidestep-encoding-issues-and-still-call-it-UTF8 that's going on. Defining characters as 8 bit is not quite correct (you will get char variables holding a fraction of a character), treating strings as arrays of characters by conversion also isn't (now you have an array of partial characters) and ignoring the encoding (just assuming UTF8) is a sure cause for annoying bugs - something the rest of the language goes great lengths to avoid. I've only read the tutorial so far. Maybe the library fixes some of the issues - we'll see. The thing is just that if you start adding metadata to your sting types (they do encode the length (in what? Characters? Partial characters? Bytes?)), then why not also at least add an encoding (to help programmers not to mix strings of different encodings)? Why do everything right and then weasel out when you get to strings? Sorry. I'm totally obsessive what string encodings is concerned :-)

deckiedan 13y ago
Sounds like you'd be a great person to join the team as chief string theorist. :-)
qznc 13y ago
I just stumbled over the way D handles this. The forum holds the discussion and reasoning, how D does it: http://forum.dlang.org/thread/uuevnvallcardcdjwikz@forum.dlang.org http://forum.dlang.org/thread/uuevnvallcardcdjwikz@forum.dla...
Araq 13y ago
Strings should be converted to UTF-8 as part of input validation. For proper input validation we have the taint mode already. Note that often a file does not include any information about the encoding, so you can only use heuristics.

ballard 13y ago

Ugh, the community is barely alive and it's an unwieldy collection of non-orthogonal constructs. Generics and a few whiz-bang features doesn't paper over the sins upon sins. I see this project cutting back features or dying under the weight of crushing unmaintainability. (sad.)

coldtea 13y ago
The above comment is content-free (at least argument wise). What are those "sins"? What are the non-orthogonal constructs, and how are they "non-orthogonal"? What's unwieldy about them? Seems mostly like pissing on somebody's work for the fun of it.
commentzorro 13y ago
>> ...unwieldy collection of non-orthogonal constructs... >> ...doesn't paper over the sins upon sins... Please elaborate. I didn't see any of that and honestly don't know what "non-orthogonal constructs" means. I'm no language design expert but would like to know what, to you, are the obvious deficiencies.
- ballard 13y ago
  Non-orthogonality: Multiple features that accomplish nearly the same result in different ways. For a language maintainer, this is another piece that will have to be supported, troubleshooted and documented. The other problem for users is that it gives a sense of confusion and uncertainty (Paradox of Choice) about the correctness of a program that may lead to multiple refactorings that don't add any value. Also, more features require more learning and makes programs harder to understand. The goals of any good language should be correctness and understandability. Arguably, Python learned the lessons from Perl. But there are many different languages, and some are better in different instances. What Nimrod turns into will be hard to say, but Go and Erlang need more competition.

pekk 13y ago

I don't understand why Nimrod has to mostly look like Python, but then make all kinds of innovations in syntax and formatting which have nothing to do with performance.

smilekzs 13y ago
And I find these "innovation" mostly solving problems that didn't have to exist.

WayneDB 13y ago

My favorite example from their tutorial: if yes("Should I delete all your important files?"): echo("I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.") else: echo("I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.")