Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language (github.com)

227 points by v0id_isgood ↗ HN
So i've been working on this project since a few days (or months i should say), it's called wyzer (meaning wiser) it's a statically typed, compiled, resource-oriented programming language with integrated distributed safety via choreographic programming and perceus memory model, The reason why i began this project is out of frustration from Rust, you see it does provide safety for your memory by the strict type checking but what it does not gurantee safety against are distributed deadlocks which is basically a few independent nodes or services wait permanently for resources or messages held by each other, forming a circular wait, the rest are cross-service correctness and protocol mismatch as well. If we are specific over here Wyzer works on mainly generalizing the concept of choreographic programming in a high level programming language because its the very few attempts of actually solving these gaps of safety. Instead of borrow checkers and lifetimes wyzer has linear/affine types and a perceus reference counting which is computationally much simpler for an LSP to understand as well

after 5 months of research and a few weeks of development i am soon going to release version 0.1.0 of it, if you would like to contribute to it you're most welcome!

59 comments

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syntax reminds me rust labguage.
Your README and docs don’t describe any of the interesting or unique things here. You cover `if` in README but not choreographic programming or perceus. Did i miss some big link?

Where’s the cool stuff?

First of all, the syntax is very generic and conservative. I’m extremely positive about that. It just looks like C or Typescript or Java to me and I don’t see mysterious diacritical marks.

The next thing is, I need more examples. Read me documents can scroll forever and that’s fine. Add examples for every concept your language wants to cover to it. This is your chance to think things through and make the read me and the language astonishing.

And your AI disclaimer (or your AI’s disclaimer) makes sense.

docs.wyzer-lang.org doesn't resolve for me, and it's prominently linked from https://wyzer-lang.vercel.app/. Since I'm not familiar with wyzer or perceus, how would one write, say, a doubly linked list in wyzer?
One thing I don’t understand is how you can guarantee the lack of a distributed deadlock. I’m sure it’s covered in the underlying research, but just conceptually it’s hard to picture.

What stops a choreography where Claire send a message to Bob but Bob is waiting for Alice and Alice is waiting for Claire?

Is it like Rust memory safety where not all valid programs are accepted but all invalid programs are rejected?

I think some examples of the distributed code in action on a trivial and non trivial distributed example is more compelling than a 3d donut render

The syntax is soooo promising but still we need more documentation. Good job anyway for doing such an amazing work with no ai
Very interesting. Maybe this would benefit from concrete examples, of things that are difficult or impossible in other languages, but well supported in Wyzer? I see there's a few high level examples, but I'm thinking concrete scenarios with code snippets might be helpful.

    const MAX: u32 = 100;  // Compile-time constant
    let x: u32 = 10;       // Cannot be changed
If x cannot be changed, how does it differ (meaningfully) from a compile time constant in a safe language, ie in a case of no raw pointers
> prentensious quote

It's "pretentious."

(said pretentiously, lol)

Hey, at least we know AI didn't write it, lol

Compiler should be called Bud.

Made an error? Hold your beer, Bud's got your back: the Bud Wyzer compiler!

No mention of the much more mature Chapel, with industry support, given the domain?
I like the ideas a lot. The Readme needs some polish (I think it’s great that it reads as hand-written; an LLM could make suggestions that make it just 10% easier to read).

Is choreographic programming the same as session types?

nice Rust-inspired syntax, although if the main selling point is choreography here, that isn't featured enough on web page or README. Needs more examples/explanation of how that works.

Promising insofar as all of the essentials seem to be right (for me): compiled, good type checker, no garbage checker etc.

Ref counting IS a form of GC. It can be slow and have issues in high perf scenarios.
I love the ambition and the fact that this is not just another "state of the art in 2015" language like I see so often. It's trying to do something genuinely different. The field of "taking stuff out of academia and making it work" is a rich and underharvested one.

However, your light is hidden under a basket, to use an old metaphor. I'm having to go digging to find the genuinely new things going on. I suggest recalibrating the entire documentation with a focus on the new stuff. People on HN often complain about not having syntax examples front and center but I would say for you, the very first thing I you should be hitting your new visitors with is the choreography idea.

Set up a simple example of doing something like a concurrent remote counter that is atomically safe by the construction of your language and immediately dive in to what that means. Forget even educating us on the rest of the mundane syntax of the language, immediately dive in to what that is and what that means. I see in the docs/ dir that it probably hurts your programmer mind to cover the choreography before covering sections 1-8, but you can safely assume that if you intrigue with the choreography that they'll hang around to learn about the rest, whereas you can't safely assume that a new reader will wade through all the rest of the relatively mundane details to get to the really interesting stuff.

A modern language with a modern take on compiling a "program" that takes a unified view of the world at the programming language level, and then emits a "server" and a "client" (and perhaps other roles) as separate executables is a pretty nifty idea. Hit it early and hit it hard.

> not just another "state of the art in 2015" language like I see so often.

Newer is not always better. Lisp is full of good ideas that haven't stopped being good, even if a pure Lisp experience is understandably not to everyone's liking.

> Go, Java, C#, and Python use garbage collectors. This makes them easier to use but slower and less predictable.

It does not. The term "garbage collectors" covers a whole spectrum of algorithms, some might slow you down (though not for the reason you may think) while others were invented to speed up memory management beyond that of C++, in exchange for other tradeoffs. Python's (mostly) refcounting GC is actually closer to C in its memory management overhead than to either Go or Java. It's also not what makes Python slow. Go uses a mark-and-sweep collector to find a balanace between speed, FFI, and footprint. Java uses moving collectors, which are faster - and some of which are even more predictable - than memory management in C++. That's because Java aims to offer better performance than C++ in large concurrent software, where low-level languages tend to suffer from various overheads due to their requirement for low-level control (Java trades off some performance in smaller programs, but mostly it trades of startup time and footprint). Moving collectors (but not refcoting collectors or mark-and-sweep collectors) are an optimisation over free-list approaches, not a compromise for convenience.

So it is true that slow programming languages tend to use some kind of GC, but that's not what makes them slow, nor does it make the super-fast languages that also use a GC (often of a very different kind) any slower. The range of languages that use GCs covers everything from the super slow to the super fast.

> Wyzer supports standard if/else, while, and for loops. Note that loops don't need parentheses around the condition.

But why!? You know what'd be cool? If we started supporting control statements that were a bit more sophisticated!

``` do { } while (c) { if (x) break foo; } else { case foo : ...; default : ...; } ```

> see a new programing language > look inside > it's rust

asking out of my own ignorance, what's so hard with rust that you cannot convince people and contribute to that directly instead of going on your way? i remember so few of these projects survived over the years. do you think it'll really become something other than your pet project?

The pitch is "one ownership rule for memory, threads, and networks," but I think there are two rules in here and they pull against each other.

The resource rule as stated is linear: once you use a resource, you can't use it again. Perceus is not that. Perceus exists precisely because values are shared — it inserts dup/drop and then reuses the allocation in place when the count happens to be 1. If everything in the language were genuinely use-once, you wouldn't need refcounting at all; a linear type system gives you the frees statically. The fact that Perceus is in the design implies aliasing is allowed, which means "one owner" is a description of the socket/interrupt layer, not of memory.

That's fine as a design — but then the elevator pitch is "two rules that rhyme," and the FAQ's central claim ("you only need to learn one rule") is the thing I'd expect to break first under contact with real programs.

Related, and more concrete: Koka and Lean get away with RC partly because their data is overwhelmingly acyclic by construction. Your README shows var bindings and mutable struct fields. Mutation plus refcounting gives you cycles, and cycles leak. What's the plan — a cycle collector, weak references, a type-level acyclicity restriction, or accepting the leak? DESIGN.md would be a good place to state it outright, because it's the first question anyone with RC experience will ask.

Looks promising, let's see into what this evolves
i wonder how agents would adopt a whole new programming language, as not much syntax examples / references are out there.