Clay 0.1.0 - Clay Programming Language

http://groups.google.com/group/clay-language/browse_thread/thread/f7df29a245b2d1da?pli=1

by kristianp • 15 years ago

46 18 15 years ago

groups.google.com

mberning• 15 years ago

I perused the documentation briefly and was left with the question: What does this allow me to do now that was previously impossible and/or extremely difficult.

Not saying anything bad about the language itself, as I've not used it, but the documentation that is linked does not give me any idea as to why I might want to try it.

jb552• 15 years ago

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.

Jimmie3• 15 years ago

Has anybody wrapped a rendering library, do you know?

niyazpk• 15 years ago

Can somebody elaborate on what "No garbage collection" means? What are the implications?

jdpage• 15 years ago

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.

udp• 15 years ago

It's quite refreshing to see a new language that doesn't have garbage collection. Memory leaks have always been less of a problem for me than the kind of performance hit GC can cause (particularly in games).

lemming• 15 years ago

Does the type system help out in any way with this? I know linear types can be used to enforce memory management, but IIRC (I haven't looked recently) Clay's type system was more oriented towards generics than this sort of strictness.

swah• 15 years ago

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.

mwexler• 15 years ago

A better explanation for this language is at http://claylabs.com/clay/. The language focuses on improving generic programming by reducing template verbosity via "whole program type propagation".

zokier2• 15 years ago

Seems somewhat similar to Rust. How do they compare?

jckarter4• 15 years ago

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.

zokier2• 15 years ago

This certainly piqued my interest. Do you reckon that eventually some of the interesting features (such as tasks, channels and smart pointers) of Rust could be implemented in Clay as libraries, with type safety and everything?

Clay 0.1.0 - Clay Programming Language

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