I'm curious about the compiled Go output though. The Result desugaring gets pretty verbose, which is totally fine for generated code, but when something breaks at runtime you're probably reading Go, not Lisette. Does the LSP handle mapping errors back to source positions?
Also wondering about calling Lisette from existing Go code (not just the other direction). That feels like the hard part for adoption in a mixed codebase.
Is the goal here to eventually be production-ready or is it more of a language design exploration? Either way it's a cool project.
Last commit was 9 years ago though, so targets Python 2.7.
I know it is Rust inspired, but why write it in Rust and not Go?
†: I've tried to transpile Rust code through WASM into Go assembly, and I've also explored how to inject trampolines into Go binaries (which involves generating Go assembly too).
I love Rust for what it is, but for most of my projects, I can’t justify the added complexity. Sure, there are a bunch of things I miss from the Rust world when I’m working on large-scale distsys services in Go, but introducing Rust in that space would be a recipe for disaster.
I guess the Go team knows that if they start adding everyone’s favorite Rust features, the language would become unrecognizable. So we’re not getting terser error-handling syntax or enums. Having union types would be nice too.
But I work in platform engineering, so my needs are quite different from someone writing business logic in Go. I understand that having a more expressive syntax is nice when you’re writing complex business code, but in reality, that almost always comes with a complexity/fragility tradeoff. That’s part of the reason no one wants to use Rust to write their business logic, despite it being so much more expressive.
For distsys, programming ergonomics matter far less compared to robustness and introspectability. So the Go runtime with Go syntax is perfect for this. But of course, that’s not true for all use cases.
Sorry for the rant - completely uncalled for. This is a cool project nonetheless :)
What would be actually nice is running async Rust on the Go green threads runtime.
Rust, of course superbly achieves its goals within its niche! But it is a niche, is my meaning here.
What I actually want is code that's correct, but ergonomic to write. So my ideal language (as strange as it sounds) would be Rust with a GC.
I don't want to worry about what string type I'm using. I want it to just work. But I want it to work correctly.
Lisette looks like it's in this exact category! It seems to combine the best aspects of both Rust and Go, which is a very promising endeavour. I'll have to take a proper look :)
Still, where absolute max performance or realtime are not required, I'd choose OCaml as it is elegant & a pleasure to code in (personal opinion, ymmv).
Having great tools. Excellent documentation. Being friendly to new users.
Yes, it's also a systems language without a runtime. But that's not the novel part. You could write horrors in C++ that approximate ML even without language support. There are eldritch libraries where some kind of pattern matching is done via generic lambdas.
The main difference is developper UX. Good tools, good error messages, quality of life. The novelty is making ML not painful.
if I can incorporate Lisette into my golang projects for example, (Invoking rust code within Golang to me feels like a larger problem and Invoking C might be easier from my tinkering experiments) I feel like you are viewing this from a pure performance metric but to be honest, most things aren't necessary to be the fastest, the type system of rust/rust-alike languages can be beneficial to people as-it-is
Check out gleam, its based on erlang so it has a runtime involved, people love gleam because it gives them a bit more expressiveness in the type system from what I've heard.
I feel like these experiments are genuinely nice, Also perhaps a project like this can then slowly also invoke tinyGo (there was a recent discussion about it too) and could be compiled into tinyGo in future iterations to have no runtime essentially as well. People who love rust, love it, but most people really find it hard to get-into as compared to golang, I really love golang for its simplicity but I wish to tinker with rust too, so if Lisette combines both of these things and atleast makes me familiar with more rust without having to jump into too many hoops
Lisette brings you the best of both worlds.
But I can't help wondering:
If it is similar to Rust why not make it the the same as Rust where it feature-matches?
Why import "foo.bar" instead of use foo::bar?
Why Bar.Baz => instead of Bar::Baz =>? What are you achieving here?
Why make it subtlety different so someone who knows Rust has to learn yet another language?
And someone who doesn't know Rust learns a language that is different enough that the knowledge doesn't transfer to writing Rust 1:1/naturally?
Also: int but float64?
Edit: typos
As for int and float64, this comes from Go's number type names. There's int, int64, and float64, but no float. It's similar to how Rust has isize but no fsize.