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by matthewtoast 3832 days ago
Very cool. It's amazing to me that the developer got it under 1KB.

This is the first I've heard of that project, but based on a quick skim, I can point out a few differences between it and Runiq - although the two are certainly similar in that they execute over a very simple plain-array-based AST. (Clearly miniMAL and Runiq were created with different ultimate aims in mind, so any fair comparison ends there. :) )

- Runiq is fully designed around async. (At first glance I'm unsure how you would express, say, an HTTP request or file I/O in miniMAL - i.e., anything which in JS would require a callback.) In Runiq it would look something like this:

    ; assuming 'print' and 'read-file' are defined in the DSL... ;
    (print (read-file "foo.txt"))
- Runiq execution happens in parallel (taking a cue from functional languages) and the tree can be reduced stepwise; Runiq has a built-in mechanism for pause and resume. It looks like miniMAL executes wholesale, but I may be mistaken.

- Runiq has no (built-in) JavaScript interop, although it would be trivial to add that feature via Runiq's DSL-building API. I specifically avoided adding any type of sytnax to talk to JS directly because I wanted Runiq to be a safe sandbox by default, with the option to add "dangerous" functions easily if need be.

But, that's super cool and I wish I'd come across that earlier!