patricksli

TypeScript, Dart, and Stanza all started attacking optional typing at around the same time.

Our approaches differ though. Stanza believes fundamentally in nominal typing as opposed to structural typing, and also views types as contracts on its behaviour rather than on its structure.

Only time will tell which approach is the best one. But we are very happy with how our design choices have panned out.

Thanks!

I (and Adam Izraelevitz) designed FIRRTL together, but for questions about Chisel, the authors frequenting the Chisel GitHub page would have far better answers than us. Please check it out! They did awesome work!

Self-hosting was a pretty hard choice to make early on, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions we ever made. It forced many semantic issues to the surface, gave us a gigantic test-suite for free, and, most importantly, forced us to use our own language. We ended up cutting a lot of features that turned out not to be very helpful from the experience of writing the hosted compiler.

The only whitespace rule that users really need to know is that "f(x)" is a syntactically different thing than "f (x)". Similar to how "fg" is a syntactically different thing than "f g" in other languages.

Thanks for trying it out. We'll make a note to point out the restrictions on tab characters earlier.

From our experience using Python, structure through indentation when coupled with the ability to mix tabs and spaces creates many troubles. Getting rid of tabs was a small price to pay to eliminate these issues.

Thanks for the kind words. The philosophy statement is not just fluff, it was the driving force behind all of Stanza's design. We hope you check it out!

Hmm. I can't seem to get the url formatter working.

Ooops.