Note: Project is not under development now. After some experementing I've decided that Haskell is good enough sandbox for my ideas and building a whole new language might not be the best idea for now due to time limits I have for this project. Still I might finish this work and it will be built around comprehensible and nice module system.
Component based, general purpose, declarative language.
Avangarde is a development platform and language inspired by different HDL langauges. It leverage the power of isolated components to build robust and scalabale abstractions.
At the moment Avangarde project in a stage of specification. We are trying to collect some ideas and drafts before starting to implement compiler. We believe that it will take less time and hassle to think, before do :)
We are planning to write compiler in Haskell and use LLVM as our backend optimizer. If you have any design suggestions for the language, feel free to open up an issue. Some of the specs might be out of date, so be careful.
Spec period will end in the late 2018 and we'll start to tweak a draft compiler. Stay tuned :)
Aren't you tired about same problems you see everywhere? How to test my code? How to organize my project structure? How to write code? What abstraction to choose, what style of coding? How to make my project comprehensible for other coders?
Avantgarde provides an opinionated approach to sustainable development for medium sized software projects. It's a mixture of the best things author have seen in hardware description languages, general purpose programming languages(Ruby, Java, C#, Haskell, Ocaml, F#, Clojure) and different frameworks and approaches to build software.
Avantgarde simplifies things dramatically and you will never need anything like AbstractFactory, IOC-container, Monad or MVC.
As Go was created as an attempt to dramatically simplify software development, Avantgarde tries to do the same, but with differen ideas.
The only thing Avantgarde gives you is Component, so think about it as about language built for COP (component oriented programming). Your task as a software developer with Avantgarde is to craft components one by one and to wire them together with a purpose to reach required functionality. Despite the fact Avantgarde will have higher-order module system, which will allow you to typecheck your code in compile time and which will act as IOC-container in the same time, it's not what you should think about - you should only craft your components.
Go uses imperative, procedural style. Restricts and forbids a lot of practice. Avantgarde does the same thing. The difference is that Avantgarde is declarative and functional, you are not allowed to apply OOP or procedural styles of programming.
You can learn more about module system ideas here:
Package: User/Authorization
Component: User
Input: login : String, password : String
Output: exists : Boolean
Functionality:
CheckUserCredentials(login=login, password=password, out=exists)
Package: User/Authorization
Component: CheckUserCredentials
Import: Authorization/Websites -- This is not a concrete implementation
Open: Authorization/bcrypt -- it's just an interface
Input: login : String, password : String
Output: out : Boolean
Functionality:
FindUser(login : String = login : String, user : Boolean = user? : Boolean)
IsTrue(a : Boolean = user? : Boolean, out : User = user : User)
CheckPassword(user : User = user : User, password : String = password : String, out : Boolean = out : Boolean)
A lot of programming tasks require you to use some kind of data structures. Avangarde provides a consistent way to create data structures.
Package: User
Structure: User
Fields:
login : String, -- This comma is not required. New line is a hint for compiler, that expression is completed.
password : String
Functionality:
Eat(food : Food =)
Sleep(bed : Bed =)
Highly encapsulated Avangarde modules might be imported to your component:
Package: User
Structure: User
Import: User/Payments/CreditCard -- concrete component
Open: User/Orders/ -- everything from Orders package
Fields:
login : String, -- This comma is not required. New line is a hint for compiler, that expression is completed.
password : String
Functionality:
Eat(food : Food =)
Sleep(bed : Bed =)
Every component allows to shutdown every effect in the system. Affraid to launch a rocket in Avanguarde? It is impossible.
Package structure:
/source_code
\
/module.av
/string.av
/controls
\
/module.av
/string.av
/tests
/misc
TODO: Parallelism and concurrency described with components.
Current open questions:
-
After some consideration typeclasses aka Haskell class looks like a natural way to handle some actions on components. The problem is that it defeats a part of original idea about language semantics. (1ML modules)
-
Type system is very unstable even conseptually. Typeclasses? Traits? Linear types? The only embraced thing is that typing is static, with inference. (1ML modules)
-
Execution based on HDL circuits is very slow. It's impossible to write a programm using this approach, so we have to either cheet and implement every low-level operation in another language (or subset of avangarde) or accept performance penalty for every action and find the solution(compiler has to know how to take circuits and transform code based on them into general performant IR).
Package: User/Authorization
Component: User
-- we can use typeclass when we do not care about some specific type:
Input: login : String, password : String, Enum(a) => user_number : a
Output: exists : Boolean
Functionality:
CheckUserCredentials(login=login, password=password, user_number=user_nubmer, out=exists)