The Fascinating Influence of the Cyclone Language (2019)

The deep well of academic and industry experience that was brought to bear on Rust's design is one of the reasons it's so good in so many areas. Most programming languages start with a developer scratching their own itch and kind of stay that way. The language grows features and learns to solve problems as the developers of the language learn the shape of those things. If the designer didn't know the PL landscape in depth, they end up spending time rediscovering lessons others have already learned.

Rust blatantly stole many of the best features of other languages and academic PL research, and its developers have spent their innovation tokens on figuring out how to get all these parts interacting, as well as how to make them ergonomic.

That brings its own challenges, but a feature like ownership and borrowing can't be bolted on afterward. It paid to get it right, and then work hard to make it easier and easier to use.

I'm glad to see more mentions of MS's Midori project. The blog posts from Joe Duffy that this article links to make for interesting reading, and I think that there's some interesting ideas there that I'd like to see more experimentation with. The two that really stand out are heavily using contracts in the language and tooling (http://joeduffyblog.com/2016/02/07/the-error-model/#bugs-aba... goes into a fair bit of detail), as well as using capability-based security.

This is very interesting. Thank you for submitting.

I recently took the source code of the GC on

https://maplant.com/gc.html

And updated it to work with amd64 and added primitive register scanning.

The code might be helpful to someone learning https://GitHub.com/samsquire/garbage-collector

One of my ideas is to see if we can do memory management by the absence of a keyword rather than the presence of a keyword.

So whenever you need to use a pointer, you import it. Whenever a scope is entered that doesn't import the keyword, it is freed. this is slightly different to RAII.

My one criticism of this post is referring to the work of Aiken in improving the static memory management in ML Kit. That should be "Aiken et al".

"I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!" -- Brian Eno

Just in case someone want's to try it I've did some work to allow build on linux (Ubuntu 18.04 and probably others too), you can see it here https://github.com/mingodad/cyclone .

I often wonder what could have been if cyclone got more adoption. I don't really think "rewrite it in cyclone" would be any more successful than "rewrite it in rust" but "incrementally port it to cyclone" could have been faster.

I didn't know dan grossman was in that team. He did a nice MOOC on coursera. I wish he did one on cyclone's ideas :)

ps: were there other safe C langs ? I kinda remember another CS based C dialect (a blue themed website) that was close to cyclone but I can't remember which.

maybe E.. damn memory.

Curious if anyone knows how they handled references between gc arenas and others using different reclamation machinery