Anic - Faster than C, Safer than Java, Simpler than *sh

http://code.google.com/p/anic?utm_source=HN

by ColinWright • 14 years ago

223 145 14 years ago

code.google.com

zheng• 14 years ago

At first I thought this was a joke due to some of the copy, but after reading through the tutorial a bit, it seems pretty interesting. Less hyperbole would be nice though. From the FAQ, ANI (the language, anic is the reference compiler) is faster than C because it is automatically parallel code. Not exactly what I think of when someone says "faster than C".

Nevertheless, for a modern take on a dataflow language, ANI is intriguing. If nothing else, the paradigm is probably different enough from imperative/OOP/functional that it is worthwhile to learn even if ANI doesn't take off.

naturalethic2• 14 years ago

After reading through the tutorial I'm absolutely fascinated. What an interesting paradigm!

joshbaptiste• 14 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1042122

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898573

sigh I still can't get past the syntax..

tedunangst3• 14 years ago

Front page claims there's a Pascal dining philosopher's implementation on the Wikipedia page. Except there isn't. There's a link to the article about Rosetta Code. After following that link, and then clicking around some more, I still haven't found this Pascal version to compare....

Anyway, the reason I ask is because I wanted to know what this line does:

=;

osener• 14 years ago

Seems like it got removed, here it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dining_philosophe...

evincarofautumn• 14 years ago

That line has no counterpart outside of ANI. At first I thought it was some kind of guard or synchronisation point, but according to the Yacc grammar, it just separates “instructors” from “outstructors”[1]. Like the rest of the syntax, it’s not terribly clear at first glance.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/anic/source/browse/src/parserGramma...

tedunangst3• 14 years ago

So much for simpler than sh...

kstenerud3• 14 years ago

Why, oh WHY did they make extensive use of the backslash character? Backslash is almost universally used as an ESCAPE SEQUENCE INITIATOR. Any other use is just going to be confusing. Especially when you end up making constructs like "(\a/\b)", or having to context shift because of string escape sequences like "\n".

hahainternet• 14 years ago

php

amespace ragedy

chime3• 14 years ago

http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/FAQ

> Q: Why are backslashes (\) used as language operators? Isn't that confusing, given they're used in other languages as escape characters?

> A: This is a valid point, but backslashes were chosen for a purely pragmatic reason; on virutally all keyboards, backslashes are very easy to type (requiring only a single keystroke). This is a handy property for backslashes to have because in ANI, you'll be typing them a lot!

> Incomers from other languages might be thrown off a tiny bit, but a programmer that's spent some time with ANI will quickly come to realize that there is actually never any good reason to end a line of ANI code with a syntactual backslash! If one insists on doing so anyway, they are writing ill-formatted code that would be confusing regardless of how backslashes are interpreted by the language. Thus, the backslash conflict is there in theory but irrelevant in practice.

> The usage of \ in the language syntax is a thought-out practical compromise, though the issue may be reconsidered in the future depending on programmer feedback.

To see what the backslash does, see the Pipes section: http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/Tutorial

Edit: I'm not defending these arguments, simply pointing out that the developers have put forth some reasons.

norswap3• 14 years ago

Yeah right, I guess the 100 millions or so French-speaking people don't amount to much. On French keyboards it's ctrl+alt+"<" (which is at the bottom left of the keyboard), or, when available "Alt Gr"+"\".

Going out of your way to produce such small and dubious improvement is always a bad idea imho.

If you really think C syntax is a pain point, the sanest thing to do is to go with textual keywords like in ruby or lua.

lobster_johnson• 14 years ago

> on virutally all keyboards, backslashes are very easy to type

That's such a typical US-centric attitude. On (most?) European Apple keyboards, "\" is alt+shift+7 or some similar Vulcan death grip combo. Not exactly "very easy to type".

terhechte2• 14 years ago

They should really try that on a German keyboard. On mine, backslash is not even listed on the keys as an icon. (Same for Swedish, Norwegian, or Dutch, I think).

kstenerud3• 14 years ago

You do know that "\" doesn't even exist on Japanese keyboards, right? It was replaced by "¥" a long time ago.

If you were serious about making things easy, you'd look at all the common keyboard layouts (not just American ones) before choosing a "thought-out practical compromise" that is of dubious practicality.

lazyjones• 14 years ago

not again, it was posted recently and still has no working implementation apparently so we can verify the "faster than C" claim.

colanderman• 14 years ago

Try to imagine, if you will, the amount of time and effort it would take you to write a bug-free, efficiently multithreaded real-time clock + infix calculator hybrid application in a language like C.

Wait, what? Why...?

franzus• 14 years ago

I bet this has been done before and is available as a C library ...

mahmud• 14 years ago

How much are you betting? "multithreaded real-time clock + infix calculator hybrid application" sounds useless and stupid in any language. No one who can code would be stupid enough to write such a thing, specially in C, and specially as a freely available library.

stesch2• 14 years ago

The \] in the examples look so strange, I thought they are some formatting error.

canadaduane• 14 years ago

I've been on the mailing list for over a year, and unfortunately, the developer seems to have abandoned it. Cool project though.

stesch2• 14 years ago

Oops. Project looks a bit dead. Newest code from 2010.

vhf• 14 years ago

Latest commit Sep. 2010. Is this project still alive ?

rdtsc9• 14 years ago

> a=[int\]<-0; op=[char\]<-' '; b=[int\]<-0; r=[int\]<-0; 0 { clock => [int ms] { ("\r" + ms/1000.0 + ":" + a + op + b + "=" + r) ->std.out; 1 std.delay (ms+1) clock} }; inLoop => {\std.in->a \std.in->op \std.in->b inLoop}; \\op ?? {'+': (\a+\b) '-': (\a-\b) '': (\a\b) '/': (\a/\b) : 0} <->r;

That is not exactly selling the language.

Saw that, closed the page.

fsaintjacques• 14 years ago

same here.

mrcharles• 14 years ago

I'll never understand why people keep going out of their way to make new weird syntaxes. Is it really necessary? Does it really give something over well established C-like syntaxes?

At the very least, people should approach new languages from an ease of typing angle. I look at that and all I can think is "That would be a bitch to type out. Doing it all day? No thank you."

jurre• 14 years ago

Ease of reading I hope!

jlgreco3• 14 years ago

I have too seemingly opposing thoughts on this.

One part of me says "Don't reinvent the wheel", but the other part of me suspects that forcing a new language to follow the syntactical conventions of another language that was designed with different considerations in mind is a bad idea.

The best example of a language that I think suffers from it's association with the syntax of another is C++. The features that it provides are all more or less fine, but cramming it into a syntax that was made for a much simpler language really wasn't a good idea.

(I understand why it was done from a historical perspective, and understand the few benefits it affords, but I think those are particular to that example)

On the other hand again, there really isn't a lack of syntaxes these days that a new language developer can look to for inspiration. Surely one of them should work fine most of the time.

eru5• 14 years ago

You could ask they the same question about C-like syntaxes? Was it really necessary to invent anything new after somebody had hit upon S-Expressions?

Anyway, to answer in the affirmative: Certain paradigms provide from certain syntax. E.g. Haskell would be much clunkier to write in a C-like syntax than with the ML-derived one it has. And Lisp's macros would be harder to pull off with a different syntax. In my opinion, Python also profits from syntactic differences with C.

Somebody more knowledgeable could talk about SQL-syntax.

> At the very least, people should approach new languages from an ease of typing angle. I look at that and all I can think is "That would be a bitch to type out. Doing it all day? No thank you."

Old languages would also benefit from that approach. We've seen some alternative syntaxes JavaScript, but not really for something like C.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

Have you read the tutorial?

ANI is a very different language to C. Using a C-like syntax wouldn't make sense.

leal• 14 years ago

It's the other way around, language designers go out of their way to conform to C-like syntax in order to cater to programmers of C-like languages.

C's syntax is a fairly low level, which makes it fairly easy to map to assembly, but not very well suited for representing high level constructs (see C++).

bunderbunder• 14 years ago

That particular snippet caused me to have a bad flashback to the days when I admired Perl for its terseness and "expressivity".

At this point I shudder at the thought of having to maintain any of that code. I'd even prefer to work on the C I was writing in high school.

rdtsc9• 14 years ago

As I say. There is write-once code. When I write it and nobody else can't read it. Then there is worse, there is wire-once and even I can't read it.

RivieraKid3• 14 years ago

Apparently, you didn't read the line above the code, saying that this is a compacted version. If you removed whitespace from a C code, you would get something that is even worse.

mikeash• 14 years ago

Why would you showcase a compacted version of the code...?

rdtsc9• 14 years ago

My point was that displaying that on the front page about your language is not going it any good.

It is like showing obfuscated C to someone you are trying to convince to look at C

DannoHung2• 14 years ago

LOOK UPON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR: http://kx.com/q/c/c/k.h

Note: This is production code.

bronson• 14 years ago

Oo, where'd you get the C minimizer?

iskander• 14 years ago

Jesus, my research project once depended on this file. The day we deleted it from the repository was a very happy one.

scott_s2• 14 years ago

  // remove more clutter
  #define O printf
  #define R return
  #define Z static
  #define P(x,y) {if(x)R(y);}
  #define U(x) P(!(x),0)
  #define SW switch
  #define CS(n,x)	case n:x;break;
  #define CD default

Thanks for that. The comment makes it classic.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

It made me scrub my eyes and go 'buhhh?'. I'm all for new languages trying new things with new syntax and design choices, but make them half decent.

podperson2• 14 years ago

Agreed, but the tutorial is actually quite good and the syntax (mostly) makes sense to me now.

What I don't understand is that writing a stream that unlatches a "variable" (a thing bound to a latch) executes once per time the variable is set, but it's not clear why the same code bound to a constant doesn't loop infinitely.

i.e.

i = [int\] <- 10; \i -> std.out;

executes once because i was set once.

i = [int\] <- 10; i -> std.out;

executes once because...

eru5• 14 years ago

The dining philosophers example doesn't look too unreadable on first glance.

rdtsc9• 14 years ago

Yeah that was ok, but why put this obfuscated code on the front page?

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

Reading the tutorial (http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/Tutorial) is a less unpleasant experience.

jetti• 14 years ago

I agree. After reading the tutorial, I want to try this out. It looks like fun.

vidarh2• 14 years ago

But after skimming over the tutorial my impression is that the concepts are so simple there's even less excuse for that horrible syntax.

Uncomfortable syntax can be excusable if you have a clear rationale for it, but I can't for the life of me see why this syntax would need to be this awkward.

hamai2• 14 years ago

Maybe the tutorial would be a better first impression:

http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/Tutorial

I thought the idea of Streams was interesting and appreciate OP for posting this.

This is a free creation by someone out there who gave their time to do something harmless, useful and freely shared.

rdtsc9• 14 years ago

There is obviously a lot of effort put in it. The idea behind it is so cool. He shared and put it up. That's very good.

But unfortunate part of sharing is also receiving criticism.

Sometimes criticism is stronger when the initial expectation is higher. I think most clicking that link got excited about all the features they read before then they got disappointed when they saw that piece of code.

So his job is not to babysit other techies, i.e. he doesn't care about how others see this project, so then he wouldn't mind the criticism either, right?

lambda• 14 years ago

Yeah, I'm having to fight really hard to continue giving the language a shot after seeing that syntax. Let's see, from their Dining Philosophers example:

[]{

Already, the syntax is starting to look a little strange, but OK, I'll give it a shot.

    id = [int\];

Hm. Backslash seems to be used for something other than escaping. Not a good sign.

=;

Huh? The equals operator is being used alone, with nothing on either side? That's really stretching the bounds of convention.

    -> --> <-> <-

We have various types of arrows that are used as syntax. In some cases, they're used as binary operators, in some cases as unary. Doubling up of dashes appears to change the meaning. This is really not looking good.

And then there's the example you mention. Besides how it looks; their example of solving a useful concurrency problem is "a bug-free, efficiently multithreaded real-time clock + infix calculator hybrid application"? Why would you even want that?

There may be something interesting here, but between their quite bizarre syntax and poorly chosen examples, they aren't doing a very good job of hooking me.

ams61102• 14 years ago

Hm. Backslash seems to be used for something other than escaping. Not a good sign.

From the tutorial[1]:

In ANI, \ means "latch". Basically, a latch is a place where you can "hold on to" an object of the specified type. A latch is like a box that you can put things in to, take things out of, and peek at what's inside.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/Tutorial

ThePherocity• 14 years ago

Agreed. Here is a suggestion to budding syntax creators: If 90% of the code is written by your pinky finger; stop. You're doing it wrong.

azakai2• 14 years ago

Of course, every new language should look exactly familiar to us users of existing languages.

God forbid we should need to learn any new syntax or shudder concepts! The old ways are the best ways.

If the example code doesn't look INSTANTLY, IMMEDIATELY awesome and amazing, it isn't worth a second glance. Even the first glance was a horrible waste of time!

peeters• 14 years ago

You're attacking a strawman. OP never said that any new syntax is bad.

ams61102• 14 years ago

On the other hand there's something to be said for terseness. Ever read a math or CS paper that's full of equations and other graphical shorthand? To the uninitiated, it's gibberish. Once you learn the conventions, it's a way to communicate complex formal ideas with very concise notation.

I'm not saying this language does a good job at that, but to dismiss something interesting just because of syntax prejudice is shortsighted.

justincormack• 14 years ago

Maths is not about conventions. It is a dynamic writing style. All operators get replaced by adjacency after a few lines as writing them is boring. Computer verifying proofs is very hard for notation reasons.

vidarh2• 14 years ago

Pretty much every CS paper I've read that was full of equations could have easily done without them. There certainly are sub-fields of CS where complex equations in papers are justified, but far too often it is laziness, and hides assumptions or imprecise descriptions that makes implementing the described methods harder.

Mostly, when I come across complex equations in CS papers, I tend to skip over them and only go back to look at them if there are parts of the paper I can't make sense of without them - it is very rare to find that they are necessary at all.

The cases where I find I need them are usually a sign of trouble - it tends to mean there'll be a lot of guesswork to figure out parameters and parts of the algorithms that are not spelled out in the paper at all. But usually the same ideas will be expressed in English, code or pseudo-code in much simpler ways.

My research for my MSc involved a bunch of papers on error correction in OCR, including a ton of image processing and statistical analysis, and not one of the 50+ papers I reviewed actually depended on the equations present in them for understanding the ideas, but I quickly learned to appreciate the ones that were light of equations for the seemingly substantially higher odds that the algorithm descriptions would be pretty much complete and precise.

bakkdoor• 14 years ago

On a german keyboard \ is not just "a single keystroke". What a pain -_-

spartango• 14 years ago

The syntax put me off at first, and still bothers me a bit (something to do with too much symbolic sugar and existing familiarity with escape chars)

That said...

I feel like this streaming syntax might be better suited as a meta-programming framework of sorts...build the more intricate objects/modules in a language such as C/C++ or java, and use these stream/latch metaphors to orchestrate those modules.

Yes, you can already do this with *sh (largely the point of Unix pipes), or directly in C/C++/Java (e.g. Storm), but ANI seems to provide a really rich interface for this kind of orchestration. It has many of the right primitives.

rdtsc9• 14 years ago

> feel like this streaming syntax might be better suited as a meta-programming framework of sorts

I think that is why the criticism is more apparent. It is exciting to have those features, but then the syntax just pushed you away.

anuraj• 14 years ago

Better than sliced bread ....

sswezey• 14 years ago

The url ends in p/anic

The syntax looks awful and confusing

forgotAgain• 14 years ago

Is it April 1st already?

jmduke• 14 years ago

* The language couldn't possibly be simpler... *

followed by

* getChopsticks = [--> ?] { \chopstick, \nextPhil.chopstick --> }; *

is just dripping with irony.

pnathan• 14 years ago

Dataflow ideas are cool, but this syntax is kind of crazy. It sounds like a neat concept to redo in a more palatable approach.

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

Original post 3 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1042122

Is there a repository of sample code? I'm curious about how interacting with the filesystem, network, graphics would look like.

scott_s2• 14 years ago

In CS literature, this programming model is called "stream computing."

I work on System S, which is the research name of IBM's InfoSphere Streams, which is a distributed, realtime (edit: soft realtime; so, high throughput, low latency, but not hard realtime with guaranteed deadlines) streaming system with an associated language. Another project in this area is Storm. See this comment thread for more on that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193115

But, Anic seems to be more related to the kind of streaming languages that came from the digital signal processing and embedded worlds. See, for example, the StreamIt project: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/

In particular, a StreamIt tutorial: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/streamit/papers/streamit-coo...

Note that Streams, Storm, Anic, StreamIt all have the same underlying programming model, but Streams and Storm target a different area than Anic and StreamIt. Streams and Storm target the emerging area of "big data" where you need to distribute your computation across a cluster. Anic and StreamIt are lower level: applications such as video decoding are streaming in nature, but one typically implements them on a single chip, and often even in hardware.

Standard disclaimer: my views are not official IBM views.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

ANI greatly resembles the programming language I was thinking of creating. Oh well.

Ralith2• 14 years ago

So contribute to it!

emilis_info• 14 years ago

Commits to ANI stopped nearly two years ago. Maybe you should still try?

You would learn a lot and that would make you a better programmer.

dkersten5• 14 years ago

I've been greatly interested in ANI-like dataflow programming languages for a long time now (though maybe not with ANI's crazy syntax). I would encourage you to give it a try! Don't let the existence of other languages hold you off (and in any case, ANI can be considered dead).

naturalethic2• 14 years ago

Take it and improve on it. I'd also experimented with puzzling out a syntax for a language like this and it's very exciting to see something that actually does it. Read through the tutorial. The syntax looks awful but is actually very coherent once you get into it. As an aside, getting there first doesn't matter. Doing it best is what matters in the long run. Apple, google, Facebook, etc.

tuananh• 14 years ago

the syntax looks like a PITA. i stopped reading right after i saw it.

archivator• 14 years ago

This looks like Communicating Sequential Processes with an ugly syntax and a standard library. What am I missing here?

cheald• 14 years ago

And apparently less readable than Perl.

efnx2• 14 years ago

This same repo was posted here in November of 2010. I started following it, but the owners quickly got overwhelmed with other projects, or work, and it all lost steam. I deleted my google group membership yesterday. Funny this pops up now.

efnx2• 14 years ago

I'm sorry, it was posted at hackurls.

v33ra• 14 years ago

Looks like it's not in active development. The documents and source code are dated 2010.

http://code.google.com/p/anic/source/list http://code.google.com/p/anic/w/list

bhavin• 14 years ago

It would help if fellow HNers read through the content a bit before upvoting something quickly. Here is a project which was last updated more than 2 years ago (no changes in source/tutorial/wiki in 2 years). There's no working implementation to support the claim. Any sane programmer would highly doubt existence of a (faster_than_C && safer_than_java) claim. Why are we as a community are becoming more and more obsessed with sensational link-baits?

dkersten5• 14 years ago

Agreed: http://code.google.com/p/anic/source/list there has been no updates since 2010. I was honestly surprised to see this on HN and actually had to double check that I wasn't seeing an old HN submission for some reason.

I was briefly involved in this project, I wrote some code for instruction selection, was active on the mailing list and had a few lengthy discussions about dataflow programming with Adrian/Ulitmus. Last I heard, in early 2011, he was still working on it, but in private, and he had changed focus somewhat to something even more ambitious. I voiced my concern over raising the bar before the first simpler version was released and feature creep, but I guess his mind was made up. I haven't heard anything since, despite trying to reach him a couple of times :-(

So, from this, I would say that ANI can safely be assumed dead unless a working compiler is surprise-released.

ramchip• 14 years ago

Same here, I had some discussion with the creator but it looked rather doomed from the start. He was worrying about parser optimization, logo design, and interactive shells, when there wasn't even any (hand-)compiled program or proof of concept of the semantics...

Ralith2• 14 years ago

> Any sane programmer would highly doubt existence of a (faster_than_C && safer_than_java) claim.

I dunno, mlton was of that order and that was ages ago.

aklofas• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure anic is fake and the website was built by a troll. My brain cannot find any meaning and any of the code. It's just gibberish

gweinberg• 14 years ago

Yes, this "language" is clearly a joke. I'm surprised to see so many comments treating it as if it were serious.

Too• 14 years ago

Suddenly regular expressions felt so readable.

jpenner• 14 years ago

Interesting ideas, but the compiler produces zero-byte executables and crashes trying to build the two-liners in the tutorial.

podperson2• 14 years ago

If you're going to complain about the syntax, complain that everything is left-to-right (except math inside expressions) except initializing variables which, for some reason, is right-to-left.

j_baker• 14 years ago

anic is the reference implementation compiler for the experimental, high-performance, implicitly parallel, deadlock-free general-purpose dataflow programming language ANI.

One other thing: anic is buzzword-compliant.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Right, because the concerns we have today primarily is high-performance uniprocessor computing. Or maybe not. Does it seem to anyone else that almost all of the people creating new languages lately are generally tackling the wrong problems?

borplk• 14 years ago

Looks like they developed it behind closed doors without asking a single person.

soup10• 14 years ago

In short, ANI seeks to break out of the shackles of imperative programming -- a stale paradigm which for four decades has produced hundreds of clones of the same fundamental feature set, none of which offer intuitive hands-off concurrency, and differing only in what lengths they go to to sugar-coat the embarrassing truth that they're all just increasingly high-level assemblers at heart;

Haha. The entire point of programming is to tell the hardware what to do. Any programming language that is not 'high-level assembly' has severe leaky-abstraction problems. The reason C and C++ still enjoy so much success despite limited syntax is that they stay true to the hardware and don't force another layer of abstraction on you.

infinitesimal• 14 years ago

Functional programming is a leaky abstraction?

swah• 14 years ago

Hm, this logo reminds me of Factor...

tawm• 14 years ago

You are now thinking with pipes.

asynchronous13• 14 years ago

This is remarkably similar to HDL in concept (though not in syntax).

buster• 14 years ago

Please, the next person who designs a language (which are often enough US people i guess), CHECK KEYBOARD LAYOUTS IN EUROPE FIRST.

Really. It's a pain to type []{} and \ on a german keyboard especially if it's supposed to be like every second character! Stop it. Please. Especially when there are proven languages that can cope without all this sh*t (yes, i am looking at python here).

Edit:

Although this might be an interesting language there is no way i am going through this syntax just to "check it out". Lost an opportunity to gain a new community member.

DanielRibeiro• 14 years ago

Comments from former submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1042122

alok-g• 14 years ago

MindTwister• 14 years ago

Did anyone notice this little gem in the URL? /p/anic

sbeckeriv• 14 years ago

No one pointed out it says panic in the url?

http://code.google.com/p/anic/

Anic - Faster than C, Safer than Java, Simpler than *sh

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