solar-research

some research about language creation

Solar

functions give meaning to types.

-- The solar type system should feel natural and intuitive. In order to archieve this, a leading design philosophy is that functions give meaning to types. Types on the other hand are not just seen as structured data, but rather a description of functions that are applicapable to a given state.

Conceptually the programmer can't even access the data behind any instance of a type directly. Instead, describing a type will automatically generate functions to derive parts of the type for us. e.g.

type Person
- birthday Date
- name String

will make the compiler create these functions

function birthday(p &Person) -> &Date
function name(p &Person) -> &String

Current Progress (implementation wise)

• AST-Parser
• AST -> Semantic AST parser
• Semantic AST -> Cranelift/LLVM IR

the last part should be decoupled as its own projects, as it makes it far easier to create jit compilers. I'm thinking about a jit compiler library called easy-jit. With a jet as logo. That would be nice I think.

Notes

solar repl

it might be nice, to have a function in the repl, to show all variables in the local scope. For IDE stuff etc.

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it might be nice, to have a session decoupled from a terminal. e.g. multiple terminals can access the same session. this way one could do this script watch 'solar repl --session 12345 -c "current_scope : tojson" | jq' and run it in a separate window to display all variables in the current scope

TODO

• Include & and &mut in the grammar under section types
• Include <Ident | FullIdent>.() in grammar To specify a concrete function. e.g. return fibonacci.(BigInt)
• Still unsure about this one: match::ObjectGuard should not access fields directly, but instead calls functions. (Which we desire to be O(1) field access)