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Prolog's Death (2010)
Maarten van Emden just posted a terrific and authoritative account of one episode in the history of Prolog under the title “Who Killed Prolog” (and, tantalizingly, promises another epis…
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How many keywords I can fit into a single C# expression?
As I was playing few days ago with “yield return await“ I got an idea to try fit as much “keywords” as possible into one “expression”. I mean as much blue words (in Visual Studio’s default colors) as possible together (not separated by semicolon, comma, colon, bracket, etc.).
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Cargo's next few years
The Cargo team have been thinking about and discussing long-term plans for Cargo. In this post I'll talk about what we hope Cargo will look like around the time of the next edition (assuming there is another edition and that it happens in about three years, neither of which is
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Perl 6's given: switch on steroids
Sometimes the best features of Perl — and even more so of Perl 6 — are found by asking yourself, “I wonder if this’ll work?” and then findin...
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Defeating Racket’s separate compilation guarantee
Being a self-described programming-language programming language is an ambitious goal. To preserve predictability while permitting linguistic extension, Racket comes equipped with a module system carefully designed to accommodate composable and compilable macros . One of the module system’s foundational properties is…
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The Power of Lifetimes
The execution of a program unfolds over some interval of time. The lifetime of every temporary resource (e.g., variable or object) is the time span between that resource’s “creation” and “destruction”. This lifetime is wholly contained within the typically-longer lifetime of the program.
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Go Is the New Ruby
How I fell in love with Ruby
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Enquire: Everything you wanted to know about your C compiler and machine
This is a program that determines many properties of the C compiler and machine that it is run on, such as minimum and maximum [un]signed char/int/long, many properties of float/ [long] double, and so on.
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Modern C++ for C Programmers
2018 is an exciting time to be a programmer, with so many good “full service” programming languages to choose from: C, C++ 2017, Go, Python, Rust and who knows Swift too. Programming languages are complicated beasts - even the simplest languages have specifications that run (or would run) in the hundreds of pages, and…
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Compiler basics (5): LLVM system calls
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 6. LLVM system calls
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Notes on a Smaller Rust
Many people who use Rust for a bit - especially those who like the language but do not fall in love with it - feel a sense that there must be a smaller, simpler variation on the same theme which would maybe be a little less powerful, but would also be much easier to use. I agree with them, but I think they are almost…
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Mu: Sketching out a minimal system programming language
In the previous post , I described what my new hobbyist computing stack looks like today, and how the design decisions seemed to accumulate inevitably from a small set of axiomatic goals. In this post I describe some (far more speculative) future plans for Mu and try to articulate how the design process continues to…
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Why I think Haskell is the best general purpose language as of June 22 2019
Me and my close friends have been interested in starting a project together and I suggested we use Haskell. I do not think the suggestion was received well or perhaps in seriousness. I have a tendency to joke about almost everything and have put forward that we use many interesting but not practical languages in the…
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Building a language server for Muon
I’m a big fan of interactive tool support for programming. I often use features like “go to definition”, “find symbol”, compile error underlining, etc. Also, earlier this year, I launched Muon, a new low-level programming language. As no tooling existed beyond the compiler, writing the initial Muon programs (such as a…
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The Kernel Programming Language
I'm developing a programming language called Kernel. Kernel is a conservative, Scheme-like dialect of Lisp in which everything is a first-class object.
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The Typestate Pattern in Rust
The typestate pattern is an API design pattern that encodes information about an object’s run-time state in its compile-time type . In particular, an API using the typestate pattern will have:
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