Recent and related:
Rewriting Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41654871 - Sept 2024 (385 comments)
I am always glad to see people pursuing creating their own programming language. More people should give it a try, IMHO.
A tricky thing that comes up with Rust comparisons is that often, Rust has a feature that's weird or hard to use, but it's because that's the only solution that makes sense within the constraints Rust has placed upon itself. Clicking some links gets me to https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/yao/de...
> Yao's biggest goals are: Correctness, Convenience, Performance, in that order.
Having clear goals is a great thing when making a language, because they give you guidance on what is appropriate to include and what is not.
Rust has certainly demonstrated having similar goals, but in a slightly different order: Correctness, Performance, and then Convenience. So it wouldn't shock me if Yao could do some things better than Rust, in accordance with its goals. But that also means that sometimes, Rust would be useful where Yao cannot be. Everything is tradeoffs.
Incidentally, I actually think that figuring out what your values are, and what your needs are, is a great way to pick a programming language. Decide what matters to you as an engineer, and then find a language that shares similar values. I gave a conference talk a few years back on this idea, and how I viewed Rust's values at the time https://www.infoq.com/presentations/rust-tradeoffs/
This was based off of bcantrill's Platform as a Reflection of Values, which was very influential on me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhx970_JKX4
If you've ever heard about Oxide's focus on values, this is some of the older background on that.
I wish I could upvote you twice.
I decided on my values because of bcantrill's talk. Everyone should watch it.
A more complete list of my values is at https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/adl/00... .
Could you elaborate on value #0 being users (and what it means to prioritize users over programmers)?
Good question. I will add that.
It means that users' convenience comes before my convenience. (I am the programmer in question.)
This means that if there is something I could do to make things easier on users, I do it, even if it is a lot more work for me.
An example is https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/c9086af225d42b2f125959... . Comments in Yao do not use the `#` character, but I added the shebang to the parser specially so that scripts could be run just like any others scripts.
> This is actually the root of the function color problem: async is exactly backwards! Instead of marking asynchronous functions, languages should have had us mark synchronous functions, and then async should have been the default!
What happens when you need to add a new trait that all existing functions must be changed to have? That's why async is generally an attribute.
The answer is that we'd have to say that all functions have some default trait set except those anti-traits they have. Then we could say that a function is async meaning "not sync", or even we could write !sync instead of async.
The post answers that.
Every unmarked function can do anything. If you add a new thing that functions can do, you assume unmarked functions can do it (even if they don't), and you add a trait for the negative.
Mostly an ad for Yao.
- Is there really a major use case for function traits? Is more elaboration of the type system actually useful?
- The original "Rewriting Rust" article discussed replacing Rust's macro system. That's not mentioned here. If you had to write your macros in Rust, to be run in compile time, would that be a win? I doubt it. Each macro would start with a call to a parser, and then you generate code as strings. This would pay off only for complex cases such as a regular expression compiler. Rust already has compile-time build programs, where you can run Rust during the build process. (I use that to take in an API definition from another source and generate Rust.)
- "Runtime capabilities" seems to be an attempt to build a container system into the language. It's not clear that helps much. That's really the OS's job. Protecting programs against themselves is nice, but not usually the problem. I'd like to see something in Android that gives an app file access with less access than "all files". Like "Can read what was installed for this app, can write working subdirectory for this app, and nothing else."
Fair criticisms, John. I just want to address macros.
Yao has something like Rust's macros. They are called "keywords," because even the built-in keywords are implemented that way. (That is why Yao can just not have a `while` keyword.)
My Yao-based build system, Rig, uses keywords to implement a build DSL. [1]
And keywords are fast to compile.
> Is there really a major use case for function traits?
Absolutely. They can be used for function overloading, and for manually creating closures from structs, which can be more ergonomic sometimes. Whether you want those features is another matter. The rust compiler supports them but doesn't expose them to stable rust.
Interesting response. I'm as curious as anyone else as to how Yao will improve upon Rust, but here is what I've observed from following several (relatively) recently created languages (Julia, Nim, Mojo, JAX):
* Language creators start with high hopes and big promises. "We've learned from the past! This will solve all the problems of previous X,Y,Z languages! It will be so much easier to use!"
* The language begins to be designed, implemented, and developed. Problems arise. Tradeoffs must be made. Invariably, the new language develops its own set of limitations, shortcomings, and weaknesses. These are inevitable with any new programming language.
* Ultimately the language either finds a userbase who are willing to overlook or work around the limitations and pitfalls, or it fades away.
* If it remains, eventually another new language arises saying "We've learned from the past! This will solve all the problems of previous X,Y,Z languages! It will be so much easier to use!" And the cycle repeats.
Now, is this a bad thing? I would argue no, not necessarily. Every time a new language is created, our vision of what is possible is expanded. We learn new lessons about what works and what doesn't work in programming languages.
So in short I'm looking forward to see how the state of the art is advanced by Yao. If it gets to a decent working state, I might even try it out if I have time. However, in light of the above statements forgive me for being skeptical of the following claim from Yao's website [1]:
> As powerful as C, As flexible as Lisp, As easy as Python, As provable as Ada/SPARK, More reliable than Rust, With the time semantics of HAL/S.
[1]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/yao/ma...
Fwiw, Zig is one of the few languages on my radar that's on the uptick. At least in my circle, I know people from firmware to VM development that moved from Rust over to Zig for its flexibility. There' also Bun that managed to nearly be a drop-in replacement for Node in a very short development cycle, which they claim is due to Zig. (I am not associated with Zig nor have a lot of experience with it yet)
I've heard great things about Zig as well. The one difference between it and Rust is the amount of industry and financial investment to date. Rust has had literally millions of dollars of buy-in from some of the biggest tech corporations on Earth, which is why I'm more confident that it will likely stick around.
This is one area where, for example, Julia has struggled. In many ways it's a fantastic language for scientific research, but it simply has never received nearly as much funding or investment as, e.g., Python.
Also Zig wants to have better memory safety before v1 - there's an issue tracking that in the zig org but I couldn't find it
On the gripping hand, Rust is the first language to popularize (not invent, hold your tomatoes) many terrific programming ideas under one wrapper. It has demonstrated how much the compiler can do to prove code is correct. Yet…it has some warts. I am quite interested in what lessons can be learned to smooth out some of the Rust edges for a language which does not have “replace C++” as the guiding principle.
Author here.
You are absolutely right to be skeptical. I wrote that a long time ago.
I did detail the current status of those claims in a comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41672316 .
Is there something like this but without concurrency? I don't need concurrency or multithreading, and most of my pain with Rust has come from the fact that it prevents me from doing things that I know are correct because it thinks my code will run in a multithreaded environment (it will not).
It seems like Yao's whole project is solving the concurrency problem.
I'm like, why not drop it entirely (if performance isn't one of the language's top priorities anyway)? What does keeping it gain that's so important? (Context: I don't understand concurrency and multithreading.)
> it prevents me from doing things that I know are correct because it thinks my code will run in a multithreaded environment
Could you elaborate on that? In your case you don't need to worry about Send/Sync, you can use Cell/RefCell, etc. The borrow checker isn't about threading, it's useful in a purely single-threaded context too.
Good question.
Yao's concurrency will be explicit. You will not get concurrency unless you open a threadset and spawn threads. Yao scripts run in a single thread by default.
I focused on solving the concurrency problem because if it is solved, single thread code is solved as well.
> that language is coming into existence right now! It is called Yao.
Wasn't it called Mojo? It's been a while since I saw traction of that new language over here.
Anyhow, it is interesting how many new languages are appearing every day. The bar is indeed constantly moving upwards.
Without sounding too much like a Cathy Woods, I'm wondering if AI can be leveraged to help with all of the non-core aspects of creating new languages? For example, really why does every language really need a json parser, or http requests library. If one were to examine the machine code instructions involved in each, they would likely be rather similar after all. Writing all of that stuff is an enormous lift for the community. Tooling is similarly "undifferentiated heavy lifting" in a way. Also, moving existing code bases to new languages is still hard.
If there were better ways to achieve these things, there would be much less inertia in the language space.
Odd post, and it landed me on the Yzena website which is very surreal. It seems to be intentionally hard from the website to figure out what Yzena is or why anyone would want to buy a license for it (or the things it makes?). There was a link to a repo full of perl scripts, though.
According to the website I'm not allowed to ask about this though ;)
I only have one Perl script in that repo...
Anyway, Yzena is my business. I am not a very good marketer, and the website is bad.
I also don't think I will get any business, but eh.
>Yao can’t be compiled in the traditional way.
>Instead, Yao will be compiled to an LLVM-like IR (which already exists), and that’s how it will be distributed. Users will have to do the final compile step on their local machines.
Is this referring to the compiler itself, or programs written in Yao?
Programs written in Yao.
If the goal is portability, Google pursued the idea of distributing cross-platform LLVM IR via PNaCl and ultimately abandoned it, because LLVM IR isn't really designed for portability.
I designed my own, uncreatively called Yvm. Yao already compiles to it.
Wow, about Yao:
"In fact, it might be better said that Yao is meant to be:
As powerful as C, As flexible as Lisp, As easy as Python, As provable as Ada/SPARK, More reliable than Rust, With the time semantics of HAL/S."
Even if I don't really believe in this incredible statement, I'm really curious to see what can be the result.
Author here.
Yeah, you shouldn't believe it yet, but here is the status of each:
* "As powerful as C": unproven. I might need something like Rust's `unsafe`, and even though I have something in mind for that, it requires that any program be expressible in Dynamic Restricted Structured Concurrency, an open problem. I am working on a proof, though.
* "As flexible as Lisp": I think this is proven. Yao has equivalents for both macros (keywords) and reader macros (lexing modes). My build system uses its own keywords to implement a build DSL [1]. The shell sublanguage uses a lexing mode, and another makes it possible to embed JSON.
* "As easy as Python": in retrospect, this isn't quite possible, but I hope to get 90% of the way.
* "As provable as Ada/SPARK": I'll let you read the design in [2] and decide for yourself. But Yao will also have contracts.
* "More reliable than Rust": unproven, but I think the lack of async will go a long way.
* "With the time semantics of HAL/S": unproven. HAL/S was what the Shuttle software was written in [3]. It was hard real-time. Because Yao will be distributed in IR form [4], the back end could leverage knowledge of worst-case instruction latencies to calculate worst-case response times. This same thing will also allow using only constant-time instructions for cryptography, using a `constant_time` function trait.
[1]: https://rigbuild.dev/build.rig5/#keywords
[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2024/05/what-rust-got-wrong-on-forma...
[3]: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
[4]: https://gavinhoward.com/2024/09/rewriting-rust-a-response/#d...
Worst case execution times are generally unknowable, even at codegen. It depends on things like the specific microarchitectural details, what other instructions are currently executing, the memory hierarchy, what instructions have been executed before, how the power supply is responding, what the thermal environment is like, etc.
HAL/S dealt with these problems by a combination of programmer/validation discipline, custom hardware designed for hard real-time usecases, and generous support from the underlying RTOS (FCOS). Cryptography code doesn't deal with it, it just avoids data dependent nondeterminism, which is good enough for those use cases.
Yes, you are correct.
My idea is to cause a compile error if the backend can't use all instructions for which it knows the worst case latency or if it can't use purely constant-time instructions.
That's essentially every instruction though. You can't write a program that doesn't access memory for example, and every memory access is nondeterministic in wall clock time.
Yes.
In the crypto example, the backend would have to be sophisticated enough to know when the same addresses would be accessed every time, like bitslicing in AES. [1]
The devil absolutely is in the details. This is why I say Yao's capabilities on this front are unproven.
[1]: https://www.bearssl.org/constanttime.html#constant-time-in-b...
> * "As provable as Ada/SPARK": I'll let you read the design in [2] and decide for yourself. But Yao will also have contracts.
Without being too self-indulgent, I'm not sure there is that big of a gap between the two in provability, there are now a huge array of verifiers for Rust code which are being used to verify real code: SAT/SMT solvers, kernels, memory allocators etc...
I agree. I think getting provability right would bring reliability along with it.
Thank you very much for your detailed answer. Will look into your links right now.
Hats off, you really did in fact a deep analysis of Rust conceptual errors by searching alternative ways to fix Rust async. Also by understanding and describing the decisions you made and what are their architectural implications (I liked the good, the bad and the ugly part).
While I can't appreciate the entirety of this language because I can't grasp all the technical subtilities, I really like the core ideas at the basis of Yao and the spirit you put into it. I hope I can play with this language some day. And wish you good luck with this nice project.
This is one of the nicest, yet honest, compliments I have ever received. Thank you!
> As flexible as Lisp": I think this is proven.
Given the development model of Lisp is modifying a live image of a running program, I have to assume you limited this statement to the availability of macros.
> Given the development model of Lisp is modifying a live image of a running program
I would say it is modifying the running program itself. An image is the saved version of the heap. Saving/loading images is optional.
But with Lisp one can also compile source files to compiled files. In rare occasions it is also possible to compile whole programs.
Yes, sorry. I should clarify that.
> Instead of marking asynchronous functions, languages should have had us mark synchronous functions […] Although that wouldn’t remove the possibility of bugs when calling a blocking function in async code,
So mark "synchronous" (i.e., non-yielding) and "asynchronous" (i.e., non-blocking). Then we can have the synchronous colour, the asynchronous colour, functions that are both (e.g. pure CPU-bound tasks, like arithmetic), and functions that are neither (e.g. buggy code).
Glad I waited before starting with Rust. Now I can just jump straight to Yao. Rust is so early 2020s.
Please don't jump to Yao! The only thing it's good for right now is to replace shell scripts.
You're still using Yao? Pfff.
> Pfff
Now I want a language named that.
> You're still using Yao? Pfff.
One-up flex master right here. Unbeatable.
Hip crowd's already moved on to Tcl, I know (with the advancements in v9.0 and all).
Tcl is yesterday's news. Hip crowd moved to artisanal ASM.