Design Goals

SulfurLang is an experimental language that explores a particular niche of the programming language design space.

The following goals

• Usability comes first
  • Documentation is a first class citizen
    • It must be painless and encouraged to write documentation
    • Documentation should support examples which should be type checked and tested.
  • Good tooling support
  • Good error messages
    • Should explain the error in simple terms
    • Should give indications about common causes
    • Should print an ascii art representation of the offending bit of code
    • Should propose a fix if feasible
  • Clear understandable unambiguous syntax
  • Batteries included standard library should be available
• Type safety comes second
  • If type inference is not possible automatically that is okay as long as we can provide sensible messages explaining the problem
  • Ability to reason about time, parallelism and effects in terms of types
  • (limited) support for dependent types (at least vector length, bounds of numbers)
  • It should be possible to express invariants about the program by using traits. These invariants can then either be checked at runtime or at compile time.
  • However not at the expense of usability
• Performance comes third
  • Packed / unpacked representation should be controllable
  • Lazy/ strict should be controllable
  • Efficient default implementations for common data structures (vector, string)
  • However not at the expense of type safety and usability
• Brevity comes fourth
  • it is desirable to not be too verbose
  • however not at the expense of any of the above goals

Syntax

Everything can be structured in definitions. Every definition has a type and a value. Example:

  define my_value
     of Integer
     as 5

Data

Data is anything that at any point may be stored in memory. There are three important layers to data:

• Data can be constructed somehow
• Data is somehow represented in memory
• Data can be read (the representation can be "decoded")