Lil' Fun Langs

11 hours ago (taylor.town)

I've been playing with my own Smalltalk implementation. I guess it qualifies as a tiny _language_, but the class library is huge!

Yes, I know that all who do not understand Smalltalk are doomed to re-implement it, poorly. I'm just cutting out the middleman - and this allows it to do things Smalltalk normally doesn't. It allows me to think so far outside the box it's not even visible anymore.

Don't know if my language is considered Lil' enough for this, but it's a pure, lazy functional language based upon Miranda (progenitor language to Haskell) that compiles to x86-64 asm. ~6700 SLOC for the (self-hosted!) compiler, and ~3300 SLOC additional for the extensive library of functional data structures and functions.

https://github.com/taolson/Admiran

My little language Newt is 7 kloc. Dunno if it's worth including, it's mostly an exercise to learn how these things work and is not as polished as I'd like.

- Self-hosted

- Compiles to javascript

- Bidirectional typechecking with NbE (based on elaboration zoo)

- Dependent type checking

- type classes

- ADTs with dependent pattern matching

- TCO (trampoline for mutually tail recursive functions)

- Erasure of compile-time only values (0, ω quantities, but not linear)

- Web playground

- LSP (added this month)

- Syntax is similar to Agda / Idris / Haskell

https://github.com/dunhamsteve/newt

  • Either newt was already in the list, or it got added. We talked a bit about using our languages for AoC 2024 -- looks like you've been keeping busy working on it!

loon is a lisp! https://github.com/ecto/loon

  [type Shape
    [Circle Float]
    [Rect Float Float]]
  
  [fn area [s]
    [match s
      [Circle r]  => [* 3.14 r r]
      [Rect w h]  => [* w h]]]
  
  [area [Circle 5.0]]

Fluent – 4K lines – including parser, interpreter, standard library, IDE, UI, docs, examples. Will grow though.

https://github.com/mlajtos/fluent/blob/main/client.tsx

The hardest part with small languages isn't the parser, it's the standard library and error messages. Getting a helpful IDE experience in that footprint is a significant engineering challenge.