cixl

Primitive types such as booleans, int, floats, times etc. are passed by value. Reference counting is only used for heap allocated values and types that themselves reference values, like pairs and tables. https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl/blob/master/src/cixl/bo...

And since composition is seamless, and they're relatively trivial to implement; they make great glue/DSL/process description languages. Take off as in replace C++ or Java, probably not. I see them more as a complement to existing languages, a more convenient way to glue the pieces together. Even wrote my own [0] to see how far it's possible to push that idea in C. [0] https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl

There are as many kinds of nils as programming languages. Cixl [0] doesn't derive nil from every other type, instead Nil and most other types derive Opt; which means that user code may specify Opt to accept nil or any other type to have them automatically trapped by function dispatch. I find this to be a nice compromise between wrapped optionals and shooting from the hip. [0] https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl#optionals

Sweet Amiga memories :) I recently reverse engineered the walker to get something simple but fun to animate, in the console no less: https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl/blob/master/devlog/cons...

Cixl? :) I realize the Forth & Lisp heritage might be a bit hard on the brain for those who haven't been exposed before, but what you're asking for is otherwise more or less what Cixl is aiming for. https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl#compiling

There are as many kinds of nulls as programming languages. Cixl [0] doesn't derive null from every other type, instead Nil and all other types derive Opt; which means that user code may specify Opt to accept nulls or any other type to have nulls automatically trapped. [0] https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl#optionals

Tetris: https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl/blob/master/examples/ci... PNG viewer: https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cximage/blob/master/examples... Linux/64 binaries may be found here: https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cxbin/blob/master/linux64

I'm pretty sure it's too late by now for Python, but I've had some success with compiling C-based interpreters [0] to C; that is, generating the actual C code that the interpreter would execute to run the program. That way you can reuse much of the interpreter, keep the dynamic behavior and still get nimble native executables. [0] https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl#compiling