Ask HN: Thoughts for a new language? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Thoughts for a new language?

4 pointsaarongough5 comments

Hey all! A few months ago I decided that I needed to learn the nitty-gritty of how programming languages work much more intimately. With that in mind last week I started the journey toward creating my own programming language called Koi.

The idea so far is that Koi will be a simple, object-oriented language with a syntax much like Ruby's, but built from the ground up to avoid blocking IO and using Fibers for concurrency. On a whim I decided to start from the bottom and am currently working on a VM prototype for the language. The VM is currently written in Ruby for ease of development/experimentation, but will be ported to C once the toolchain/architecture is somewhat stable.

I am interested in hearing any suggestions/tips that you have for the language's design and implementation. At this point it's impossible to tell if the language will be useful, or just a toy. But I would like to give it the best chance possible at succeeding and learn as much as possible in the process.

For those interested, the experimental VM implementation is here: http://github.com/aarongough/koi-vm (Note that it's very incomplete, slow and changing quickly...)

Try writing a type inference engine. I did one over the last few days as the first big step in a game scripting language I'm working on - and at least in my case the implementation turned out to be only a bit convoluted; the main hurdles are in the details of coercions and casts. Once you have the engine running you can get lots of "bang" out of it in terms of helpful error messages and syntactical conveniences.

I represent the different types and coercions as graph nodes(casts are direct connections between types), and then cache all the possible paths for inference by walking the tree from each node with a depth-first search.

Once the graph is set up and the paths are assigned, then I can run tests to see if a coercion path is possible, whether additional coercion or casting steps are needed, and if there is an ambiguity in the input or output types at any point. Today I retrofitted my engine to include multiple arguments in coercions, so that many->one functions can be included in the graph.

A side effect of resolving ambiguities is that I have to include hinting for both which argument of the coercion is used for input, and for the output type, if multiple output types are possible.

I should describe the two goals of my language while I'm at it:

1. To allow the game engine to treat its entities and components as types, so that the scripts never have to deal with the difference between a "Monster" archetype and a "Collision" component attached to the monster - where the collision data is, and how it's accessed, are just part of the type system. Thus the syntax will let you say something like move(me(),vec2D(3,3)); without explicitly resolving me() into "the collision component of the entity of the calling script."

2. The language includes constructs for timing and tweening; events are atomic transactions with applicative/imperative abilities, but they hold a time value, and yield execution after processing "everything that happened" during a single update timeslice; the script can jump to different moments in time to loop a cycle of actions; and tweening operations like fades or bounce effects can be queued to run on every update with new parameters, so that there is no more timer bookkeeping going on.

I still have to nail down all the details of the runtime model, and then the syntax. But so far it's looking pretty good.

Try to implement the flash AVM2 virtual machine:

http://mahmud.arablug.org/avm2-opcodes-complete.txt

I started work on it in Lisp and made some minor progress when Adobe decided to cockblock and released Tamarin under the GPL.

Bit more stuff:

http://mahmud.arablug.org/avm2-undocumented-opcodes.txt

Feel free to pick my brains on the flash platform, if you want your toy to support multimedia. I got a gut-full of it with absolutely no possible use :-/

[Edit:

Should you go the flash route, I should be able to pull some IRC logs of interesting discussions as well.]

Let me add that language design != language implementation.

Try to prototype your language design in a very high-level language, preferably one with macros. So you can iron out the kinks rapidly without being bogged down by machine limitations. Also, try to use a homoiconic syntax for easy parsing, so you're not stressing over lexical analysis and other string manipulation crap.

Once you have the high-level semantics ironed out, you can choose a suitable intermediate representation, one that can handle several phases of optimization. Register or graph based IR, like SSA, will allow you to capture code and data flow, and it presents an underlying "machine" architecture with abundant resources (cheap infinite registers for starters.)

Stack-based IRs are compact and excellent for virtual interpretation, they also capture lexical scope and procedure call very well, but you will have to expend a bit more effort should you want to compile them for a native processor.

The easiest language to implement would probably be a block-structured Algol dialect (say, Oberon or Pascal) but without runtime heap allocation. That way you're not messing with garbage collection. You can allocate your application memory at startup or compile time and it will sit and stay in there. See Chapter 10 of this:

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/pascal/book/pascalimplementa...

If you want first-class environments and closures you will need GC and a heap. You will also need a heap if you want first class objects or dynamic exception handling.

The language design stuff is boring, and you can be inspired by various designs out there. It's the runtime implementation that's funny, but very exciting.

Good luck.

I like the idea of prototyping the language syntax in a high-level language, it reflects nicely what I'm currently doing with the VM. I'll definitely look into that.

Clearly I still have a lot more reading/learning to do! Should be fun :-p

Thanks Mahmud! I'm not really interested in re-implementing another language at the moment (though I probably will in the future), but it's really good to read the documentation/opcodes for other VMs. Others I've had a look at so far are YARV, Parrot and Lua. I definitely need to check out the docs for the JVM at some point too...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com