Cyber is a new language for fast, efficient, and concurrent scripting | Hacker News Reader

Cyber is a new language for fast, efficient, and concurrent scripting

cyberscript.dev

156 pointsbeefman74 comments

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It seems to have kept a lot of good things from python, but fixes many quirks:

- slicing with index or with index+length ? Well, both apparently!

- len() is a method

- ranges and slices have the same syntax

- you can use | to avoid the indentation hell that comes with '''

- true, false and none don't have an upper case first letter

- the lambda design allow for multi lines, despite the language being heavily biased toward statements. And it's using "=>".

- circular imports do not cause errors

- explicit export, although i'd prefer it to be opt in

- lua style ffi

- mapping on dict key/values is the simple case

- CYON is quite interesting

- and of course concurrency and perf from the start

But some of them will cause big troubles:

"errors are values and do not propogate up the call stack by default. Users are not forced to handle errors unless the error value is passed to a typed destination."

Yeah, silent errors in bash scripting taught me I really don't want that.

"The shorthand method for calling functions omits parentheses and commas"

The reason I still can't parse Ruby after 15 years.

The shorthand method use case is declarative UI code, an important use case for scripting languages (flutter also changed Dart syntax for this)

Why are programming language designers so bad at naming languages. Pick something that doesn't already have a gazillion search results, people! Go, Swift, Rust, Cyber, all bad. Though I'm still hoping for a UI library for Go where the elements are called gadgets, just so we at Google can look them up under go/go/gadget/Button.

It's a hard job! All the good names (Java, C, Brainfuck) are taken.

C is a terrible name for searching too, although in it's defence it was invented before Google.

So was Java!

And yet, it doesn't appear to have hurt my ability to quickly and easily locate information regarding any of those languages.

Those other languages were created/sponsored by huge corporations. Search for "Cyber Script" on Google, none of the top results include cyberscript.dev

Okay. When I search for “Cyber Script” on kagi.com, cyberscript.dev is the third result.

Google search is user hostile. Or to drag out that overused cliche, on Google search, the advertisers are the customers, while the attention of people searching the web is the product.

Don't forget my favorite example: Processing.

Absolutely, I was just talking about it on another post where they were using Curl to find occurrences of programming languages by name[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34554701

Adding 'language' or 'programming' to the search query should solve it. Anyway Google seem to retain context when searching certain topics. But yeah there's definitely room for improvement and creativity here.

Building a new language in a new language (zig) is quite the choice. Usually you choose your host language to leverage some aspect of its ecosystem — whether that be a VM like JVM, or a standard library, or something else.

The other reason would be that writing a language takes time, measured in years and decades. Usually you would pick a well-supported language so that you can be assured it won’t disappear before you’ve finished yours.

I’m only just looking through the project now, but would be interested in finding the author’s rationale for writing this in Zig. Seems like with Zig you wouldn’t get any of this, so I’m wondering why go this direction.

Zig isn't that new at this point. It was talked about here when Go reached 1.0.

Looking at the commit history of the Zig repo, the first commit was in 2016, so that can’t be right; Go hit 1.0 in 2012. Unless maybe it was just being talked about in 2012.

Either way, that’s still pretty new as far as languages go these days, and the bus factor still seems to be 1 or at best 3. There has to be some compelling reason that Zig was the choice here and I’m curious.

true, first appearance in 2016 https://andrewkelley.me/post/intro-to-zig.html

Does this mean the term “being good at cyber” will actually mean something now?

Having grown up on the internet in the 90s I assure you it meant something before

I grew up in the 70s with the term cybernetics from Norber Wiener, and I liked it before Gibson's Neuromancer in the 80s, so I guess I was inoculated before the pandemic use of the word. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a term being bandied about a bit now (reading Logical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems, and it is pretty cool [1]; Andrew Sorensen's Extempore as a CPS environment [2]). I also attended the first HOPE in 1994 in NYC and although the press abused the term cyber, it's still cool to me! But the Papa John's stuff was funny.

[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-63588-0

[2] https://github.com/digego/extempore

Yes, yes it did and it's part of the reason I really hate the term.

Cyberterrorist hacker department of redundancy department again.

It could be worse: grandmas could still be using AOL on Windows 95 getting to know a lovely Nigerian prince.

Apropos: ProgressBar95. Where Clippy attacks.

I love it, it unmasks charlatans and those who live in constant fear of the FBI van picking them up..

I like your perspective

I grew up in the 70s with the term cybernetics from Norber Wiener, and I liked it before Gibson's Neuromancer in the 80s, so I guess I was innoculated before the pandemic use of the word. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a term being bandied about a bit now (reading Logical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems, and it is pretty cool[1]; Andrew Sorensen's Extempore as an environment for Cyber-Physical Systems). I also attended the first HOPE in 1994 in NYC and although the press abused the term cyber, it's still cool to me!

[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-63588-0

I still make fun of Cyber Monday.

This guy chats

I put on my robe and wizard hat.

For those who don’t know this gem of internet history (NSFW text) [0], KYM is slightly less NSFW-y [1]

[0]: http://www.megalomaniac.com/%7Eandrew/funny/bloodcyber.html

[1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-put-on-my-robe-and-wizard-h...

holy shit this is gold. How have I never seen these. TIL.

They are (IIRC) originally from bash.org, which is defunct nowadays.

Sploosh.

For me, "cyber" will always mean an automatic control system with built-in feedback loop.

I put the blame on William Gibson for any other connotation.

Benchmarks for fib are great and all, but unless you are making fibonacci simulator 2023 it's not really a good selling point.

What I really want to know when looking at a scripting language is: how easy is it really to embed? Does it have a good debugger? Does it make too many assumptions about how your program works? Can it scale for a larger project? Does it have any interesting features like apis for reflection?

Love that it allows circular reference and does not crash immediately.

> https://github.com/fubark/cyber/blob/master/docs/docs.md#hel...

> 1 == 2 -- Evaluates to `true`

Is that an error in the doc because I am not sure why this would the case then:

> 1 != 2 -- Evaluates to `true`

Seems very Javascripty to me if it isn’t a typo.

It's an error in the docs. 1 == 2 evaluates to false.

You mean allowing circular references seems Javascripty or you mean outright incorrect equality checks seems Javascripty? I don't think Javascript suffers from the latter, as long as you understand the implicit casting Javascript deos.

Sorry I was typing on the phone so didn't space out the two issues properly.

The circular reference handling is neat and something I've never thought of before.

The docs comment about 1==2 and 1!=2 was unrelated. But if the doc was not in error, then it was Javascripty.

This looks awesome. What are the plans for host security? For example, LUA is secure in the sense that you can explicitly disallow it to use APIs that can modify the operating system. This makes it a good candidate for multiplayer games.

OOC... What's that lua option called? Thanks!

Lots of features that look really great to see at first blush. As a bruised and battered Python programmer, the only thing missing from my list would be static compilation target/deployment strategy. Having a first class option to distribute code is important to me.

janet then. I think it's the only one of the class of small embeddable languages that also has that use case built in from the beginning.

I think the syntax puts most people off, as they are used to c-like languages.

Implemented 96.3% in Zig. Very cool!

Although for my own scripting language, I use Rust. The functional bits make writing compiler programs really fun.

No performance comparisons to julia? Julia is pretty much the language I would currently look into for a scripting language outside python, so it might be a pretty relevant comparison target.

They seem to be going for an embeddable engine, I'm not sure how you would do that for Julia with its LLVM toolchain.

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/embedding/

Q: Suggest five names for new scripting languages

ChatGPT: "ZenScript" "FluxScript" "EchoScript" "QuantumScript" "NimbleScript"

Q: Suggest five more names, but pick names that do not end in "script"

A: "ZenCode" "FluxLang" "EchoCode" "QuantumLang" "NimbleCode"

Q: Can you suggest 5 more names that are not based on existing words?

A: "Krynn" "Nymbl" "Zephyr" "Glimmr" "Vynce"

> Suggest five more names, but pick names that do not end in "script"

Kinda cheating to reply to this with s/Script/Lang/ from the previous answer, since those were not 5 more names. I blame it using the same seed for its random number generator : - D

>Zephyr

I have news for chatgpt

This looks great. The first use case that occurs to me is to accelerate pieces of our horribly slow Ansible scripts - but I'm probably the only one on our team who's interested in making the investment in learning a new language, and dealing with the bespoke code. How do I generate the required enthusiasm?

Personally I think that would be a pretty hard sell. Writing custom code, presumably for things used in production, in a new language that isn't even at version 1?

Plus slow & steady wins the race.

It's better to use predictable code in production and this language hasn't even been battle-tested yet.

Itself implemented in a new language not yet at version 1..

If you're committed to, and enjoy the combination of, Python & YAML & Jinja2 - but don't enjoy the architecture, performance, and sharp edges of Ansible, you may want to review Saltstack as a config management tool. It's not a drop-in replacement, of course, but it's much closer to where you are now than the traditional two alternatives.

However, as others have observed to you, it's not a good idea to replace your current functional Ansible menagerie with a new unstable language + no framework.

Is there someone alive who enjoys that particular combo?

It's probably the set of three words most likely to send me into a corner, crying.

Is Ansible slow because of Python? I had always assumed the performance was due to excessive network roundtrips.

We're using ansible-pull. Aside from occasional access to NFS mounts, there's a minimum of network traffic. E.g., the git retrieval is usually: I've got version x. That's current? Thanks, we're done. The time is spent executing Ansible modules on the local system. 200+ tasks ok, 200+ tasks skipped, maybe 10 changed. That takes between 5 and 20 minutes. I have an unsubstantiated suspicion that the large dictionary representing the package inventory is a contributor - systems with fewer packages seem to work faster.

From my experience, it is not always just the network. Ansible can be slow in operations such as copying files between directories on the remote target. I suffered from this a couple of years ago and the solution I implemented was to delegate the copy operation to a bash script and leave Ansible to just take care of uploading that script and run it passing the configured parameters.

Anyways, if the network is a problem I strongly recommend to have a look to "Ansible pull".

bingo. there is a flag you can set that eliminates most , if not all. It's not slow cause it's written in 'python'. It's slow because of safety.

> How do I generate the required enthusiasm?

Find a good use case that justifies using an unstable language. This is typically internal developer tooling or testing systems.

Personally I would love a language with better type+test system than python for shuffling json around and math stuff. Python's dict functionality feels like a big fat hack (recusive merging, splitting json, detection of subdict etc) and likewise the xml stuff (there is no guide what xml tooling to use and what is broken in what python version and a third party package is better than libstd).

First, establish that the language is the issue. Measure. It's difficult for me to imagine a situation with Ansible scripts where the performance bottleneck is the raw performance of the python runtime.

I feel really stupid for asking this - how do I install it to play around? I cannot see anything in the docs.

From the GitHub page, here are some binary releases: https://github.com/fubark/cyber/releases

You can also try it online: https://cyberscript.dev/play.html

Thank you for your guidance.

Here are the build instructions:

https://github.com/fubark/cyber/blob/master/docs/build.md

Thank you very much.

Looks really nice! one thing I instantly noticed though is the import order, would be nice if they could consider switching the path and module name around, like `from "x" import y`, not sure why modern languages would still do it like this.

I’m wondering if all values are boxed, like in Python, which is increasing RAM usage and creating a lot indirections, instead of being able to create arrays and structs where the members are located in the same block of contiguous memory.

Values seem to be nan-boxed, which means numbers are simply doubles and therefore will still be located in the same block of contiguous memory. When the higher 8 bits are FF the remaining 48 normally are an indirection pointer. So right, for anything other than numbers your cache misses increase, but storing dynamically sized objects like strings or tuples or maps continuously in array is a hard problem anyway not to mention storage in maps or in tables.

Since this is seemingly a byte code or threaded code based VM, your code execution probably also contributes to cache exhaustion.

no windows:

https://github.com/fubark/cyber/issues/1

a/s/l wanna cyber?

How’s the standard library?

async dispatch / job groups / continuous input processing?

closures / text or int data ranges and filters(comprehensions)?

databases / sqlite related data processing tools?

"std"-like shim/ boiler plate commands for popular tooling to launch ml / cv tasks, or any tasks that require a bunch of standartized steps?

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