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Ask HN: Your Programming Language Wish List

3 points by tashmahalic ↗ HN
What do you want from your programming languages and tools that you don't have now?

What innovations would make your programming substantially better?

What upcoming language features/libraries/semantics/syntax are you excited about?

2 comments

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Jeaye
I want something which brings functional programming, immutable data structures, and code-as-data macros (Clojure) to the statically-typed world of deterministic object lifetimes (C++).

I've been working on such a language for a year or so now https://github.com/jeaye/jank and it compiles to C++14. Trading data locality (due to immutable data structures) for more approachable parallelism might be a big win in the systems-level world. Removing OOP aspects entirely, and focusing on parametric polymorphism and functional programming will offer a different way of approaching systems-level tasks.

For situations where mutability, assembly, or the use of a C or C++ library is required, jank aims to offer seamless integration; calling into C++, using C++ types, etc, can be done without worrying about name mangling or marshalling.

It's still very new, and not yet usable, but the compiler is complete enough for me to have used it for real-time rendering in OpenGL, integrating the C calls directly into jank's type system.

tashmahalic
I like that you have an opinion about what should be different and are doing something about it (creating your own language).

What's the reason you want deterministic object lifetimes? So that you get predictable performance? Can reason about performance?