Clay 0.1.0 - Clay Programming Language

It's an expressive systems language with lambdas. So, anything you would be using C for + the power you get from lambdas and generic types. In a way you could think of it as Go with a more advanced type system, and without the garbage collection.

I'm looking forward to writing a game in Clay to measure its true performance in a realtime system.

It means that you have to make sure to deallocate any memory you allocate when you are done with it. Basically, the same as C and C++, as opposed to garbage-collected languages like Python or Java, which will automatically detect when you are done with a chunk of memory and deallocate it for you.

This is a strong statement for a language to make, but it actually makes it much more interesting.

To me, this says "Clay should be used to implement the same kind of hard-core stuff that is still implemented in C++": games, interpreters, compilers, browsers, etc.

Clay is a lot more flexible and metaprogrammable than Rust. Clay allows ad-hoc overloading with predication based on arbitrary compile-time computation, whereas Rust's polymorphism support is more strictly based on Hindley-Milner parametric polymorphism and type classes. On the other hand, Rust, by baking features like shared/unique pointers and logging into the language, is able to provide much stronger safety guarantees with a much simpler type system than Clay would need to provide the equivalent guarantees. Rust also requires a runtime, which supports some cool features like lightweight tasks, cycle collection, and builtin logging, whereas Clay sticks to a "no runtime other than libc" mandate. Overall, Rust will probably be a much better choice for large-scale application development than Clay. The cool thing about Clay is that it's like a scripting language for LLVM. It's great for flexibly generating small amounts of native code without runtime dependencies.