LanguageDesign.md

General

More functional Prefer expressions over statements

Functional C?

Types

The usual: i32, f64, etc.

• void is (), a zero-byte thing
• blob type for some data

Generic Type Params: Rust Style? -> would be nice to not have to specify

Protocols/Typeclasses

Kinda want types to be arbitrary, i.e. an i32 is not instrinsically a number, it just happens to have a binary operation called addition.

Syntatic Sugar

x.foo(y)

is turned into

TypeName_foo(x, y)

where TypeName is replaced with the name of the type of x, i.e. if ls is of type ArrayList, then ls.pop() is ArrayList_pop(ls)

Memory handling

Reference counting

Every heap-allocated struct should also come with a function of the name TypeName_destroy, i.e. ArrayList_destroy that decrements the reference counter and frees all memory if rc_decr returns NO_LONGER_IN_USE.

• Whenever a scope goes away, i.e. a block is exited, all variables of that scope that are heap-allocated have rc_decr called on them.
• When to increment
  • When a value is assigned to a new variable, i.e. let y = x
  • When a value is passed to a function, i.e. foo(x)
  • When a value is being returned from a function, i.e. return x
  • When a value is being passed out of an if block, i.e. if condition { x } else { y }
• Reference counting needs to be cleaned up - it should be that there is a boxed typeclass that automatically implements a method for incrementing and decrementing references - preferably inline - and a destroy method the objects own cleanup