LinearML

It’s always fun to look at the flow of knowledge from academia to the industry, and how some things can take decades. Reminds me of LinearML which was an experiment nearly 10 years ago. https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML/blob/b1a49f153e02f3cffb...

A few years ago I would have suggested LinearML - https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML. Now it may be quite a challenge, to just compile it.

A shout out for LinearML https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML Development kinda stopped after the author joined FB. Hoping for a revival.

I dream of something like https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML one day coming into the scene.

Function programming with no garbage collector is tough. There is a formalisation for dealing with this, called linear logic, which allows you to statically determine object lifetimes; but it's, um, a bit awkward. Such as, every value must be produced once and consumed once, so if you want to look at a variable, you need to produce a new variable with the same value (which must be consumed later). The seminal linearly typed language is Linear Lisp, which is almost incomprehensible, and also a proof-of-concept which doesn't do anything useful. Classic paper here: http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/LinearLisp.html The closest thing to a modern language that uses them exclusively (Rust doesn't, by the way) is LinearML, which was an experimental toy, now abandoned. Tutorial here, which may be interesting: https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML/w

PreScheme was a LISP to replace C for low-level programming. Used manual, memory management instead of GC. Very fast and efficient. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.3.4... Formally verified plus a Scheme48 interpreter as part of VLISP project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PreScheme ATS has no garbage collector that I'm aware of. I've seen it used in device drivers and 8-bit MCU's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_(programming_language) LinearML is GC-less, functional, parallel programming. https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML So, functional languages neither require GC's nor infinite memory. Two also combined low-level efficiency with easy, formal verification vs C programs. So, that's higher mapping of idea to code, high efficiency, and better safety all at once. "You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x8

Fantastic explanation of linear types. Another (experimental) language that uses linear types to facilitate concurrency/parallelism is LinearML: https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML

With a purely linear type system, memory management could be handled statically, negating the need for traditional GC. The underlying behavior would be closer to C-style just-in-time {de-}allocation, or C++ RAII. LinearML is an attempt at this: https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML