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Yaks: A Tiny Typed Language From Scratch, With All the Bells and Whistles

Language

  • Traditional front end: Lexer, Parser to CST, Transformer to AST

    • Concrete vs. Abstract Syntax Tree is Important (see below)

  • Type Checker

  • Compiler (to WASM) That Relies on Types (+)

  • Interpreter that does dynamic checks (for quick prototyping)

  • Data Types:

    • Bool Num (is a float for mandelbrot)
    • Str List Vector[T] (+)
      • with UTF-8 support? At least count the length

Advanced features later (+)

  • String Interpolation (echo "hello \(name)")

  • Comptime like Zig, (C++ constexpr/consteval), D has this too I think

    • (constexpr x (+ 2 3)
    • (constexpr [x Int] (+ 2 3)

  • Serialization with YON: Yaks Object Notation

    • TODO: static vs. dynamic variant?

  • Reader macros?

    • Quasi-quote with \\(foo $unquote @splice)

    • Not sure if we need $(a b) @(c d), maybe not

      • I think those are just variables

    • for shell $(echo hi) => (cmd echo hi) ?

    • $(echo "hello \(name)") => (cmd echo hi) ?

    • There's a conflict between string substitution $var $(echo hi) and macro

    • use case: and macro

  • Julia uses $

  • Elixir just uses unquote(x) and unquote do end?

Runtimes

node.js interpreter

  • just use process.stdout and process.stdin?
    • for reading and writing YON

WebAssembly

  • console.log() binding I guess

  • maybe the <canvas></canvas> binding for Mandelbrot

  • Exchange YON with browser?

    • "" string literal syntax should be easy
    • I guess you can send UTF-8 strings, but not everything

Unix - Plain C?

  • File I/O with Int FD

  • (fork) and (wait) concurreency?

  • What about garbage collection and signals?

Tools

  • Formatter

    • indentation and whitespace
    • maybe comments -- we don't have that right now -- I think Lisps traditionally have some problems with this

  • Linter

    • unused variables

  • Syntax highlighter in Treesitter? I want to at least try it

  • Test framework? Probably need it, could use macros for assert?

  • Bundler? Probably not, we don't have modules?

"IDE" from Scratch

  • textarea and input box

  • reprint the whole text with <span class="error"></span> when there's an error

  • IDE server with completion

    • look at matklad posts
    • the three loops?
    • complete keywords/functions first
      • but really you need objects like (obj.method 1 2 3)

Applications

  • Mandelbrot (graphics)
    • Num and Vector[Num]
  • Shak: Shell implemented in Yaks?
    • can probably use Deno/node.js stdout, and possibly
    • $(echo hi)

Another Framing

Title: A Statically Typed Language in 500 lines of TypeScript (or Python)

"Simplest code that's not a toy" -- Has a good parser with exhaustive reasoning, and gives precise error emssages. Based on Oils.

  • Similar to "500 lines or less" book (which doesn't have this)