Show HN: Yaksha Programming Language

It is a rather large project. So here is some information about tech stack.

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Tech stack: Code is written in C++ for the compiler

carpntr - which acts as the builder is built using Yaksha itself. (I use a python script to bootstrap and carpntr to build carpntr as a second step)

hammer - cross compiler for C/C++ projects written in Yaksha (I'm building Linux version of Yaksha compiler on Windows box leveraging `zig c++`)

Yaksha comes with zig to use zig cc.

Runtime: this is written in C. (There are no .dlls involved, things get built statically, only subset will be built and linked)

Standard library: written in Yaksha.

YakshaIntelliJ - written in Java

Various scripts - Python.

Reminds me of Nim, but with more Python influence on the standard library and overall syntax. It does share the ideal that a Python-esque syntax can be nice for system's programming.

Its surprising how fun programming can be when you eschew unneeded syntactical complexity! Though personally I prefer having memory management and lifetimes handled automatically by default, but with the option for manual management when desired.

Yes I agree. Time will tell how it will grow. Hopefully it will have a good use.

That's really lots of work from a one-man band. I can empathise as I am also developing https://github.com/chaosprint/glicol

Since you mentioned wasm, I think it would be great to have a REPL on the website in the future.

I had help with the landing page. However, rest is mostly me. But I'm using lot of third-party stuff also.

REPL I have been thinking for a while, I'm not sure how I would do it unless there is a way to run zig cc in browser.

Would be harder without having a backend at the moment as it needs to run a C compiler to generate the final executable. (Not an interpreter)

perhaps refer to the tech behind rust playground: https://play.rust-lang.org/help

Thank you.

The Compiler Explorer aka Godbolt also would be a good example: https://c.godbolt.org Source: https://github.com/compiler-explorer/compiler-explorer

Perhaps https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc would be useful? I've had success using it to implement a repl for my language.

BTW glicol looks & sounds really good. I have always day dreamed how I would DJ but instead of using traditional tools, I'd be using a programming language to do it. I never had guts to do it in real life tho! :)

I wish every programming language website was like this. First thing you see is a short description the language, with an image on the side showing example code. Beneath that, a short example program that does something non-trivial. This is the way.

Glad you liked it.

A great job! But I found the docs too formal and techincal, which is more like a lang spec. It would be more appealing if some tutorials added.

Yes very good point, I started this by writing a spec. However I already started a tutorial section in github discussions: https://github.com/orgs/YakshaLang/discussions/categories/tu.... I should add a link to it in main page.

I'm late to the party, but I want to say thank you for sharing this. It's inspiring to look at how much you've built and (hopefully) enjoyed the process of building! I'm loving everything -- your site, your language design, your docs, your builtin libraries, your dev tools. Beyond impressive. People like you are the ones who make HN one of my best places on the internet.

For context on where I'm coming from, about two weeks ago I picked up Crafting Interpreters [1] for fun. I'm finding your clear-yet-concise Compiler internals [2] to be particularly compelling reading, and jumping back and forth between those "how this all works" docs and the live example of this language you actually built do a WASM-compiled tree-blowing-in-the-wind animation is just... just wow. So freaking cool!

I also enjoyed reading the comment thread that inspired you to start on Yaksha and seeing how this project has a wholesome start as inspiration-by-programming-hero. I hope you recognize that a few years later you've now ascended from inspiree to inspirer. I also hope you're still having tons of fun building out Yaksha!

[1] https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/

[2] https://yakshalang.github.io/documentation.html#compiler-int...

Do you mind having a "Why a new language?" primer with some deeper philosophy on your choices? I will never question anyone's desire to make a language for learning or hobby. However, when presenting it to the world for practical use, there has to be some persuasion to move people off of existing tools.

I use Nim at work (I'm lucky) so I'd love to see that comparison in particular, it also being a transpiled-to-C language. I also use it to build static binaries with musl-libc and it's quite easy and clean.

Sure, main goal was fun. But I should have a write up some time.

I wanted to see following:

1) Does manual memory management become easier when you use python-esque syntax? 2) OpenCL with @device like syntax so you can mix kernel code and client code in same .yaka file. - Not even started (Not sure if achievable with my time constraints)

Obvious question: why a new low level programming language when we have C, Zig, Nim? What are its strengths over these?

Why did anyone make an album after the Beatles Rubber Soul ?

A programming language is closer to an instrument, not actual music.

Why make a new instrument that sounds the same as another instrument? You would expect new instruments to make different sounds, not just have a different control scheme.

IDK, ergonomics?

Say that to the plethora of custom made guitars with different necks, different amount of strings, type of strings etc.

Show it to /r/ProgrammingLanguages when you have a chance.

done. Thank you!

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/11vnm...

I'm very surprised that this is actually a single person's workload. "Because I am also a programming language designer and developer, I have worked in it for approximately 3 years, and it also supports compiling to WASM." https://github.com/KusionStack/KCLVM

I have seen its language design and compiler implementation, and I am sure I will continue to follow and watch the development of Yaksha Programming Language. If possible, I would like to contribute.

It's probably in your plans, but it would be nice a page showing the syntax (for example, control flow and variable declaration).

There are some samples. But yes this is a good idea.

Nice. Is it named after the folklore Yakshagana[1]? The logo does resemble the face of a Yaksha.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakshagana

Logo is based on a Sri Lankan traditional mask for Fire Devil (Gini Yaka). https://uk.lakpura.com/pages/raksha-masks

yes, indirectly.. likely named after Yakshas themselves - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaksha

Very nice. I had experimented with transpiling Python to C straight from the AST in Python itself. Does this plan to add type inference or "generics"? Currently it appears everything must be explicitly typed.

yes it is in my local repo. but it is not done yet.

I think the Language Grammar section doesn't correctly report the grammar you have implemented. For example the "if" and "while" statements lack the condition!

Hey, thank you. good catch

Really nice language. Would you mind describing the modules/libraries system? I see you have a Python-style import and I'm curious how you implemented this in a language that compiles to C.

Everything compiles to a big .c file. capntr - tool that acts as builder knows which part of runtime to compile and link. Imports are not dynamic like python. Does not have all the features of Python import also.

What's with newer languages putting types after variable/function names? Then you need an extra symbol : or -> and a function keyword. It also breaks readability of long function headers as you have to read the name skip to the end to read the return type then back to the first argument. Is there a good reason for this trend?

I think mainly

1) Easy to parse (less ambiguous) 2) We like Python

It is easier to parse and you don't get the abomination that is C function pointers

It makes me wonder why C put the ultimate type on the left and not on the right.

C type/variable declarations are an expression that transforms the type/variable into a primitive type, which is then annotated on the left of the expression. Why not on the right?

Because parsers, like humans, read from left to right. Important parsing decisions are usually made as early as possible. An example is recursive descent parsing, which derives its simplicity from making decisions first, allowing a top-down parse. And when humans skim text, I bet it can be shown that it's easier if the syntactically significant locations are aligned near the beginning of each statement.

The intent, as I understand it, is that "declaration should look like use", so that the base type is on the left. If you declare int *foo; then *foo is an int.

IMHO the existence of "cdecl" is evidence that it might not have been the right choice.

Declaration should look like use is nonsense though. I mean, what is the practical benefit of putting the pointer to the left of the name instead right to the type? For pointers the difference is literally just on which side of the space the asterisk sits at the expensive of making it unreasonably difficult to represent nesting of type constructs.

It’s super easy to parse, I added types to a JavaScript parser I play around with in maybe a half an hour just to see if I liked it.

It probably helped that I just parse to an AST that’s generated so experiments like this are trivial.

It’s super easy to parse until you have interesting higher order functions.

Variable/Parameter names are nicely aligned so there's less scanning to read them. Personally I usually read function arguments before return type, but I can see instances where I'd want to look at return type first. If you're line breaking on parameters for long function signatures, it's not so bad though—the return type will be in a predictable place.

The convention dates back to at least ML in the 70s, possibly even longer time back. So it is not some new thing, it's recent rise in popularity is more a reflection in MLs increasing influence in language design space.

If I'd had to guess, the syntax might be inspired by math notation such as x ∈ ℝ

Well, note that partly due to the way variables and functions are declared in C and C++, parsing those languages (especially C++) is a complete mess.

I think the readability argument is pretty subjective. Personally I find declarations in for instance Rust a lot easier to quickly scan than C++. For one thing the names of functions are all at the same offset, which to me is actually the most important thing. I can see at a glance whether it's a function or variable being declared. I've never found the fact that the return type is at the end to be a problem - why would it be?

fn first_function(...) -> i32 { ... }

fn second_function(...) -> Vec<i32> { ... }

const X: i32 = 0;

vs

int first_function(...) { ... }

vector<int> second_function(...) { ... }

int X = 0;

I think the C syntax was actually a compromise to simplify the grammar. Remember C dates back to the 60s, and computers had very little RAM and storage back then, so they had to be very clever in how they designed the language. The C function pointer syntax is the way it is because you can reuse the same grammatical rules for parsing types as you do expressions. Pointers are prefix and function calls are suffix.

It's been like this in the academia (Mathematics in particular) since ever.

Also, some people say that it makes for easier (less ambiguous?) parsing.

But the -> part is a bit weird. It "shouldn't" be

    def factorial(x: int) -> int:

but it "should" be

    def factorial(x: int): int =

Maybe it's that way because of Python?

yes

Some languages use the colon syntax, such as the Pascal family. Others, like Rust and Gleam, use the arrow syntax.

The arrow syntax meshes better with the idea that there's a difference between the types of values, and the meaning of a function signature. "foo: t" declares a name "foo" as having a type "t", but functions are abstractions — what is the "type" of factorial()? It's not "int".

The type of factorial() could be written:

    (int) -> int

or just:

    int -> int

If you look at the ML family as well as Haskell, that's exactly how they express it.

They do that for other reasons, too; those languages follow lambda calculus, which only has single-argument functions, so all functions are simply mappings between a single value to another value.

Because type before name is simply worse in every metrics, hard to parse, hard to omit when infer (change to auto, var, etc), hard to grep for definition (hence the hack <type>\n<name>).

Why do you care about the return type before the name?

The : and -> are not strictly speaking necessary. Some languages, like go, put the type after the variable name and return type at the end of the function signature without requiring a : or a ->.

Having to always use a colon before the type is better than having to sometimes write "typename" before the type. Not to mention that it makes the code easier to read.

If you had never heard about C and its legacy, and were to create your own programming language, would you come up with a syntax like C's?

The structure 'term: definition' is pretty common in many natural languages and has a lot of advantages: all terms are aligned, you can sort them, you can grep the term you're looking for, etc.

I even think it should be extended to functions, too. That 'def' ruins the harmony. Instead of

  def factorial(int) -> int

it should be

  factorial: fn(int) -> int

You trade a keyword ('def') for another ('fn') but open the way to lambdas (just the part after the colon).

I agree that the -> serves no purpose, it could be made optional. Alternatively one could require the -> and dismiss the 'fn' keyword, like this:

  factorial: (int) -> int

It's slightly harder for the parser who has to wait until the -> to understand what it's reading, but it's doable.

About putting the return type after the parameters, that absolutely reflects how I reason about functions: I will want to first examine its input, and then its output. Even the man pages for common functions and commands explain the parameters first, and leave the return value last.

Looks pretty cool! What happens if a program attempts a use-after-free? If this is "memory safe" (aside from leaks) then I think it sits in a pretty interesting space!

Boom! it is an unsafe language. Hence the fire devil logo.

Nice! My initial take: love Python-inspired languages but I think manual memory management is distinctly anti-Python so not sure how well that works together.

That is the point!

Why aren't you using the LLVM infrastructure?

What's wrong with compiling to C? By using C as an intermediate language LLVM can be a backend through Clang, but so can GCC, MSVC, Intel C, etc. It's actually a pretty common choice (see Nim, Chicken Scheme, etc.).

I did not want to use that because LLVM was just too big! I tried building a sample and it gave me > 1GB debug .exe file.

zig wraps things up to a nicer package, so I thought might as well use zig cc.

Another language that compiles to C: Vala.

It has a C#-like syntax.

Are you planning to add alternative backends in addition to transpiling to C99?

Yes I originally wanted to add support for OpenCL style C code too. Time will tell if I figure out how to implement it.

Nice job. Is the name a pun on “yak shaving”?

Had no idea this was a thing. Yaksha - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaksha.

Logo is based on traditional Sri Lankan Yaka/Yaksha/Raksha mask.

Looks like gdscript. Not a bad thing!

Thank you.

Exactly what I always wanted

Nice !

There are no pointers?

yes there are pointers. See some samples here: https://github.com/YakshaLang/Yaksha/blob/e72d7984a4c8d49e4d...

No lambda ?

not yet that is.

Beautiful.

Thank you

This is totally unrelated to the language itself, but...

You have my greatest appreciation for building proper responsive websites in all those links, with proper CSS styles and sizing (rem units)!

I use a 40" 4K screen (no HiDPI) and almost any other website, including the most popular ones (I just checked github, google, bing) do not really follow responsible principles, use px units, and end up using just a tiny column of the screen... and they are not even consistent: bing and google use the left 1/3rd of the screen, github the central 1/3rd.

Home page was actually built by my wife. https://github.com/tashvit.

Other CSS are probably just luck ;)

A+ family

I had to scale down the design to 50% scale to get it to fit on my screen without everything looking huge and wrapping, but after that everything looked usable.

[1] Full size: https://i.imgur.com/R0I6Vxs.png

[2] Half size: https://i.imgur.com/tQ6KpR4.png

Not sure if huge text is just the style these days, though. Probably looks great on a huge screen.

My experience is that tiny text is the style. I'm much more likely to have to scale something up than down. I can't remember the last time I scaled something down, but I scale things up every day. (I also liked the size choices of the OP... honestly wouldn't have minded slightly bigger).

Sorry, not so good with CSS. Home page should look better I think. :) Will fix it at some point

You don't even need a setup like that to feel that pain. That pretty accurately describes my experience with those websites - and many others - with just a 24" 1920x1200 monitor.

The weird silver lining is that most sites are also using fonts a bit too far on the small side for me, and don't respond too well if you jack them up much. But that unused 2/3s of the screen ends up allowing most websites to take a fair bit of zoom without any changes in layout.

I really don't get modern website design.