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by throwaway17_17
3 days ago
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I find the goals of explicitness and maintainability to be really pitched to my current taste. From a quick view it looks like the syntax is approaching a local maximum for conforming to expectations and not sacrificing the explicitness sought. As the developer, where do you land on meta-programming for the language? I applaud the straight up nature of ‘the battery will never be included’ and the reminder to consider the possibility of a feature being a library instead of a syntax or language feature. I certainly don’t think meta-programming is essential, but the ability can contribute to the ease of use for library code. And I’ll ask now since it always comes up, where does Mach stand on ‘advanced’ type theory uses for ‘low-level’ programming? I noticed the admonition that safety is the developers job which is sure to bring some ‘heat’ from the memory-safety-is-table-stakes crowd, in light of that, where does Mach stand regarding ways to ensure ‘safety’? |
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The only thing I may consider in the future is something along the lines of a VERY weak macros system, but that's a highly well explored and well known footCANNON that I'm not keen on implementing. I do have designs in mind if it ever becomes an essential, but for the foreseeable future, any sort of metaprogramming is practically off the table.
On safety... That's a big one. I'm absolutely prepared to take smoke for that all day and I know I will be. Memory management is one of those problems that every programmer has to deal with at some point in their career, whether it's fighting a GC, fighting a borrow checker, or fighting poorly written code. I decided to go "back to basics" and encourage programmers to fight their own knowledge of the system and to be more aware of the code they are writing. Yes, that means that it can be more difficult to write code that is... "safe"... but when it comes down to it, Rust and C are both compiled to CPU instructions that have no concept of memory management intrinsically. Taking the load off the developer has the side effect of removing total control with it. In my opinion, it's a situation of throwing the baby out with the bath water for a benefit that can be fully achieved through best practices and proper understanding of the code you're writing. Does that help clarify my stance? I hope it does lol
Glad you took the time to explore the project! Thank you for that!