Something like Caml Light - precursor to Ocaml - but with translation to C instead of bytecode, so it will be fast and will have comfortable integration with C libraries.
I like the lack of GC! What is the method for always incremental compilation? The benefits are obvious, but isn't it problematic to have two authoritative representations of the same source? It would be fantastic if you get that to work well!
C is great, and it would be cool to see something that is similarly close to the instruction set but has functions as values
Of course there are many programming patterns that are in more acceptable functional programming languages than C. Whether a programming language is considered functional is not the same as which patterns are supported in the language.
For the record, there is not one accepted definition, but we can get close by saying that FP languages are those based on lambda calculus as their semantics core. And the primary mechanism in lambda calculus is variable capture (as done in closures).
C is based on the Von-Neumann model and has absolutely nothing to do with the lambda calculus. No reasonable PL expert considers it functional.
[0] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Functional-C-Hartel-Mu...
[1] https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/5128727/book.pd...
(edit) add download link and background.
It's a good representation of the PDP-11 and similar-era computers. It's also a good abstraction for modern microcontrollers.
C's view of the world is also a really poor fit for today's larger CPUs. Your computer has to jump through a ton of hoops to make itself seem C-like. C has no concept of vectorization, speculative execution, branch prediction, multiple cores, caches, MMUs, etc.
For basically any desktop/laptop/smartphone CPU, the C runtime is more like a little VM than an accurate model of the hardware underneath.
OK, but vectorisation is exposed by the instruction set, as instructions[1]
> speculative execution, branch prediction, ... caches, MMUs
How would you expose speculative execution & branch prediction? Cache behaviour is well understood so what's wrong with it? What would you do to expose MMUs to the programmer, and what would they do with it/how would it help?
[1] but aren't there libraries that expose it just fine in a portable way?
But they are thoroughly ingrained into the technology, and will not easily be rooted out.
The more expressive your language is, the less the runtime and hardware needs to guess about.
This is a very deep and mature assessment. I have high expectations for the future of Ante. Higher than Rust, in particular, provided it supports some analog of destructors.
> I'd really like to find "the low-level functional language" without "the fun stuff"
But current stable Ocaml has neither of the "fun stuff" mentioned and compiles to native code. So isn't that exactly what you want?
It doesn't even need lifetime analysis because automatic garbage collection be praised.
And algebraic effects are awesome. Sure they are not mainstream yet but conceptional there is a strong parallel to the Common Lisp condition system which is quite established. Not sure why you wouldn't want to have them. Also it is still a long way until we will see them used in user facing stuff in Ocaml.
I'm not Ocaml implementation expert, but I suppose Ocaml exception handling and garbage collector could be tricky to aware about when one extend or embed Ocaml.
To be honestly, my fellow did Ocaml embedding once. He made able to load natively-compiled plugins written in Ocaml into C based software. And it worked. I didn't dig into details, though. There was at least one bug regarding garbage collection (and it happens that I fixed it).
The only gain from emiting C code is portability to weird architecture that would be covered by C compilers but not the OCaml one; which is arguably a pretty niche use-case.
Even though I’ll never release it, it was a rewarding theoretical and practical exercise.
As an aside, I really love how detailed and example-ful Ante’s site is. It looks like a ‘fun’ language and I hope the creator keeps working on it.
Really, perhaps your language is The Next One.
Then there are people who will criticize just about anything for the sake of doing it. Just ignore those people and make a day more interesting for the people who share your passions.
I would love to imagine I could be the next Andrew Kelly (creator of Zig), I don’t know that I can actually be a language founder.
Nevertheless I think there is space for experimental/research languages. Just don't burden yourself thinking in terms of "this is the next great thing" and it will be fun, and perhaps your work and the ideas underlying it will even leave a mark, even if that doesn't necessarily mean that the particular incarnation of that particular language will ever reach adoption.
We not only stand on the shoulder of giants. We all stand on the shoulders of billions of dwarfs.
You will only know if you try. Things that are worth it take courage me thinks.