Fusion Programming Language
fusion-lang.org45 points by efrecon 3 days ago
45 points by efrecon 3 days ago
I'd love to see a comparison to Haxe. https://haxe.org/
I wonder what performance and generated code size/quality look like.
From https://github.com/fusionlanguage/fut/discussions/119#discus...
> I've read about Haxe in 2000s, before I started my work on Fusion. They have different design goals: in Haxe you create whole apps, in Fusion you create components to be used from other languages. Haxe has syntax similar to the (now dead) ActionScript, Fusion is similar to C#. Fusion transpiles to C, D, Swift, TypeScript, OpenCL and Haxe does not.
At a time I was very interested in haxe, but their focus on games made it (perceived as) lacking in the area I wanted to use it (cross platform client-server apps). Recently rust seems to have taken this role for me.
Nice idea. I'm just wondering how to debug code written in fusion... probably you must focus on one of outputs, debug that one, and then back-fit the changes to the fusion source. :/
> implementing reusable components (libraries) for C, C++, C#, D, Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift, TypeScript and OpenCL C, all from single codebase
Why is this needed? I can't imagine that. I am sure writing code in fusion will produce C++ and Python code which is suboptimal and doesn't fit well in these languages.
ORMs and variations like Protobuf or things that have to be cross-plateform in the wide sense. The perspective that the same source will behave the same in various environments, and "velocity" trumps performance considerations. If you want to work on things where performance matters, consider embedded/firmware programming ;-)
I think the target application is writing the same algorithm in multiple places with a guarantee that the logic will be based on a single source of truth. Not unlike Protocol Buffers work to standardize data layout across platforms.
It still feels overcomplicated compared to the standard solution of writing a library in a compiled language you like, exposing a C ABI compatible interface, and hooking it up to any language that can work with that (i.e. any language).
C code called from other languages has terrible ergonomics. Writing it sucks, debugging it sucks, maintaining it sucks.
I don't know if fusion is the solution, but I know C isn't.
What about a better ABI abstraction?
There is GObject, COM, C++/CX and WinRT.
I personally am thinking that developing more programming languages has stopped making sense a long time ago because all of them ignore this untapped market that would help more languages.
C based FFI uniquely privileges C the same way the dollar being a global reserve currency privileges the US, but in the case of currencies the differences in how they work are very small, but with programming languages the differences are substantial.
Half the people working on new programming languages should have been working on GObject competitors instead.
One of the things that is difficult to grasp is that the best FFI is not native to a specific programming language, meaning it does not privilege any specific programming language. Of course this doesn't mean that it cannot be heavily inspired by a particular programming language, it just means that the implementation must be common to all programming languages.
What I mean by the latter is that the features need to be implementable in all programming languages and the easiest way to do it is to define common data types.
The big fallacy that the C FFI advocates present is that it is somehow fine to require full C compiler infrastructure and the C standard library to parse C headers and produce the ABI, but somehow it is the height of evil to define a fat pointer as a C struct consisting of a data pointer and a function pointer and mandating every language to use it, because it is not a C native datatype and only the mythical programming language C is allowed to be used for FFI. I'm pretty sure half the battle could have been won by C having defined common datatypes for the sole purpose of ffi in its standard library.
The syntax is so warm and simple, but not too simple. I like it, but I wonder how debuggable it can be, or if there is an interpreter for learning.
The idea it's good but hard to make it good. A universal language is hard to optimise for a particular language.
The point, AFAICT, is not in using all capabilities of all the target languages. Rather, it's about expressing some narrower class of computations and grafting them seamlessly into the target languages. Think of data formats, parsers, network protocols, stuff like handling and rendering of text, etc.
Wow, this is really fusion. I like it.
Fusion is a programming language designed for implementing reusable components (libraries) for C, C++, C#, D, Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift, TypeScript and OpenCL C, all from single codebase.
What are the use cases? I am curious why Rust was not targeted.
I suppose you can write various algorithms in it, and have that code natively trsnspiled to different languages, for ease of native interoperability. It's unlikely to produce the absolutely most optimized code, but the lack of the interface translation barrier (aka FFI) may more than compensate for it.
Rust is not easy to target efficiently, due to the borrow checker, and they likely don't want to dyn Box everything.