A few years back, I started exploring programming language implementations. Generally, I wanted to understand the kind of decisions and trade-offs that programming language designers make: specifically, I was curious as to why Scala made some of the decisions that they did, and so I went down the road of trying to build a language that “fixed” what I perceived to be issues in Scala. That language was called Cornerstone.
After a while, I discovered that there are good reasons why Scala does things the way it does. In those “fixes”, what I was asking for was basically having my cake and eating it, too. Cornerstone was born of naiveté, and so while it was a wonderful educational opportunity, it was a stillborn language.
With lessons learned, I reconsidered my approach and started in on a new language, Ashlar. In my free time this summer, as a counter-balance to the pastoral/ministerial work I was doing, I cranked on Ashlar. It’s still just getting started, but a big hurdle has been crossed: the runtime is up and running, and the compiler infrastructure is in place. The functional test of printing “Hello, World” has gone from red to green. By request, I’ve added a bit of a description up on the Ashlar wiki, so go check it out.
In particular, there is an extensive conversation about the assumptions of Ashlar. Let me know what you think about that: I’m very curious.
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