Fancy a self-hosted programming language for the Rubinius VM

by riffraff • 15 years ago

41 13 15 years ago

When I saw that this was inspired by Erlang, I expected to see light-weight processes and built-in language constructs to support Actor style message passing between processes. I don't see that or anything else Erlang like.

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

Is it on the roadmap?

bakkdoor3• 15 years ago

Yes.

riffraff• 15 years ago

apparently it's not documented but there is some code in the examples lib in github. It looks more like Io than erlang to me.

https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/examples/async... https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/examples/futur... https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/examples/futur...

nathanwdavis3• 15 years ago

So, it looks like @@ is how you send a message to an actor. But there are still a lot of questions I have about what the implementation of that actor is: a lightweight process, a unit of computation to be scheduled, or is it essentially the same as calling any other function?

It will be interesting to see how Fancy evolves its Actor features in comparison to other languages with built-in Actors.

jamii• 15 years ago

I'm pretty tired of languages that claim 'erlang-style' concurrency without any of the erlang features that actually make it useful (process isolation, link/monitor, supervisors etc).

EDIT: Personally, I would also add to the above list: algebraic data types, optional static typing with a (mostly) sane type system, no inheritance / minimal indirection, immutable by default, (reasonably) good introspection, support for live code replacement.

nathanwdavis3• 15 years ago

Yes, thank you for reminding me how awesome Erlang is!

bakkdoor3• 15 years ago

Hi, I'm the author of Fancy. The erlang-style actor message passing hasn't been implemented yet. I'm workin on that though. Rubinius has a built-in Channel type, (similar to go) and an Actor library built on top of it. Once I get some of the other language features I'm currently working on done, I'll focus on that part of the language. It just takes some time to get all these things finished, but it was always a goal to have this in the language. Rubinius also has inter-vm communication which I will expose in Fancy as part of the language as well. Another feature I'm currently working on is first-class pattern matching that preserves encapsulation (basically you have patterns as first-class values and matching an object against a pattern involves asking the object if it matches a given pattern - that way you don't break encapsulation). Hope that explains some of your concerns.

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

Back when I was looking at hosting Ruby on Smalltalk VMs, I was playing around with parsers and compiler-compilers.

From what I saw, the Ruby language has about 108 terminals+nonterminals in its grammar.

Python has something like 29 term+nonterm.

Smalltalk (an advanced dialect with namespaces and syntactically distinct class bindings) has 8 term+nonterm.

The Ruby syntax is about 3X bigger than Python's, which in turn is about 3X bigger than Smalltalk's.

I'd like to peruse the syntax of Fancy. If it's significantly smaller than Ruby's, then programming tools will appear in the Fancy community at a much faster rate than they did in Ruby. If large swathes of it are homomorphic to Ruby, then lots of Ruby library code could appear in Fancy at a high rate.

EDIT: Yes, size of the syntax is a real consideration. Just two guys wrote the widely used Refactoring Browser for Smalltalk, which includes a recursive meta-syntax parser engine. I have hand written a top-down parser for Smalltalk, and I completed it in just one afternoon. Contrast this with the situation several years ago, of multiple teams of Ruby syntax "study groups" that each labored many months to produce parsers outside of the Matz Ruby VM. (Yes, an "interpreter" is still a VM! The distinction is nonsense at this point.) Smaller syntaxes mean faster language/tool innovation!

cygwin982• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, by parsers and compiler-compilers did you mean Lex and Yacc? It is always a significant undertaking to implement a dynamic language in that way.

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

Lex, Yacc, the RBParser, and SmaCC, and perhaps some others.

Fancy a self-hosted programming language for the Rubinius VM

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