Author here. Not sure why it was posted, but this (really old) project is basically defunct. I gave github.com/luna/* to the people creating the visual Luna language that was on HN recently. Moving it to my account must have caught someone's eye.
Anyway it was just a toy project that I never had enough time/motivation to complete. I was inspired by the size of Lua's VM, but deterred by its obscurity (and lack of inline documentation), so my original goal was to create a very clean and minimal VM.
> I was inspired by the size of Lua's VM, but deterred by its obscurity (and lack of inline documentation), so my original goal was to create a very clean and minimal VM.
It's about the same size as Lua, significantly faster, and much more thoroughly documented. I also like the language itself more — it's object model is more familiar to someone coming from Java/C++/C#/etc. — but that's personal preference.
... heh and then I scroll down and see two people have already mentioned Wren. I guess I'm doing a good job of branding it as the "better documented Lua". :)
Interesting language, and looks fairly concise to write. I imagine shoehorning all numbers into doubles makes for slower integer code. Also a shame you included pervasive null.
Wren looks straightforward enough that you could have a static type system without losing any expressiveness. Have you considered that?
> I imagine shoehorning all numbers into doubles makes for slower integer code.
Maybe, though in a bytecode-compiled, dynamically typed language, my hunch is that using doubles for everything is actually faster. If I had separate integer and float types, all of the arithmetic operators would have do runtime type tests to handle the different combinations and conversions.
I could be wrong, though. Either way, only having doubles definitely simplifies the VM.
> Also a shame you included pervasive null.
Yeah, it doesn't come up too often in practice. Unlike, say, JS, Wren considers it a runtime error to call a function without enough arguments. I'm not a big fan of null, but in a dynamically typed language it's sort of inevitable. It's the result type of a function with no explicit return.
> Wren looks straightforward enough that you could have a static type system without losing any expressiveness. Have you considered that?
Yes! I'm interested in trying to layer an optional type system on top of it, and I tried to design most of the language and core library such that it's amenable to that.
However, designing a type system is really hard, so I don't know how well it'll pan out. Now that the language itself is pretty far along and you can write useful programs in it, I'm hoping to start tinkering with this and see what I can come up with.
> Maybe, though in a bytecode-compiled, dynamically typed language, my hunch is that using doubles for everything is actually faster. If I had separate integer and float types, all of the arithmetic operators would have do runtime type tests to handle the different combinations and conversions.
Perhaps. I suppose this dovetails with my preference for static types with optional dynamic behaviour, and not the contrary default which seems to be your position.
> I'm interested in trying to layer an optional type system on top of it, and I tried to design most of the language and core library such that it's amenable to that.
Cool. I think Wren is simple enough that basic type inference should be straightforward and complete, and anything more difficult just infers a top/'dynamic' type. A trivially correct type inference algorithm then just infers type 'dynamic' everywhere, which recovers Wren's current semantics. Then you incrementally add more specific rules where you can, ie. simple data flow from constants will generate more efficient string, floating point and integer code.
That would be enough for a decent speedup on most programs. If you want to type check arbitrary objects (or at least avoid method-not-understood), you can use something like "Type Inference for First-Class Messages with Match-Functions" [1] or the even more general first-class labels [2]. I believe first-class labels are more general than Wren's semantics.
> I suppose this dovetails with my preference for static types with optional dynamic behaviour, and not the contrary default which seems to be your position.
I do like that in general. If I could wave a magic wand and create a language to fit my personal desires, it would be statically typed.
But when I sat down to create Wren, I had to modulate that by what I was capable of. I figured I had the time and skill to pull off a small bytecode-interpreted, embeddable dynamically typed language, I and thought there might be room in the world of languages for it to find a niche as that.
> That would be enough for a decent speedup on most programs.
I'm not currently planning to use static analysis to affect the runtime behavior since I think that would add a bunch of complexity to the VM. I was thinking more about it in terms of finding bugs and code navigation.
The code looks nice and straightforward, and kudos on actually producing a typed language. IMO, there's too little of that these days.
Too bad you didn't get around to implementing context threading, because I would have liked to see a clean and portable implementation, particularly if you had also planned to support TCO. Is the design you had planned documented anywhere?
It's very similar to _why's potion, for which I'm the maintainer now. I added lot's of internal documentation there, but haven't got to add type support (easy, but lof of work) and multi-threading (not easy with this GC). coros, exceptions however are there.
Luna looked great a year ago, since its syntax it ever-so-close to ideal. If it has momentum now, I'd invest a lot of time writing bindings to popular C libraries, an event loop, and a web framework. But it's not functional yet, or probably ever unless someone adopts it. I'm a fan of tj's other work though. I don't see how he can pump out so many quality npm packages and the like.
Those languages are too big, so I might as well use Ruby or the Node environment when I need a full-featured language with lots of libraries. I'd like something dead simple that I can statically link into my C programs, with a syntax I can completely explain to someone in 15 minutes. I currently use duktape/Coffeescript or Lua/Moonscript for that, since hosting it in C is about ~5 lines of boilerplate code.
Edit: Does anyone know of any other languages similar to the syntax of Coffeescript and Moonscript?
I am working on a language with goals similar to this which is much farther along though still not quite ready for practical use. For example, there it does not currently have a C API. It is written in Rust so it shouldn't be to difficult to provide once I feel it is usable.
I wouldn't get my hopes up :D. I just moved it from luna/luna so the other guys can have the org. Other than the one guy hacking on it a little bit there isn't any work going into it. Primarily because I'm really enjoying Go, so I don't have much of a reason to work on an alt.
Anyway it was just a toy project that I never had enough time/motivation to complete. I was inspired by the size of Lua's VM, but deterred by its obscurity (and lack of inline documentation), so my original goal was to create a very clean and minimal VM.