C³wife

This time it was a fantastic week-end, we had a meal with an old friend and an unexpected guest. Can it get any better than a table, with nice (french-canadian) food on it, and intelligent people around it, talking about programming language design? Aside from being wise and clever, what our new friend brought was experience. Insights from others that went down the road of creating a programming language is a precious thing. We learned a lot about the challenges that waits ahead.

We spent a large part of the conversation challenging Alex on his design. Until this day, a few friends had challenged him and I also do the same on a daily basis. But our two guests had a different approach, they have a lot of experience with C++ and other languages, and are actively participating in the D 2.0 effort. They are somewhat part of the competition! This time, I switched side and practiced my own sales pitch to stand by my husband. We had to cross the language barrier as well, English being a second language for everyone.

This challenge was very stimulating, discovering what others seek into a programming language, finding about things we never thought about, explain ideas and try to be convincing about them, and the most important, having fun doing all that. We also reached a point where things were not defined, or refined enough to explain it to someone else, there we had to realize the necessity of putting things down on paper.

After all this, I was bursting with ideas about the importance of documentation in the elaboration of a clear vision. I started working on a new twist of the iterative methodology and couldn’t stop. We went to a Christmas music concert and I started writing everywhere on the concert program. I wanted to write a blog post about this, but I have to calm down and make something organized with all this before it becomes possible.

The dynamic between the two of us is taking shape with each challenges, what is my role into all this, and where he has to work alone. I am growing skills in communication and management in my day job, but in the end, he is the technical expert. This is probably to our advantage, we complete each other in so many ways. They say that behind every great man there’s a great woman, with such a great husband, I will have to surpass myself to keep this saying true.

We had a very slow week-end. Some friends came home saturday evening, and we went to sleep after too much food, wine, beer and video games. No wonder why it was so hard to get out of bed Sunday morning. So instead of getting things done, we spent some time together, talking about C³ on the pillow. Alex was telling me how existing programming languages were inspiring him and making things possible for him. He suggested I wrote something about it. I thought it was a very good idea.

C³ doesn’t intend to change everything, on the contrary, my husband want to take what is best in the already existing languages and bring that to the next level. Reinventing the wheel is not about starting from scratch, it’s about learning from the past, taking advantage of the tools you have, that your ancestors didn’t, and innovating at the same time.

Low-level inspirations

An inspiration I didn’t expect was LLVM. We have coded in C and C++ for so many years, those languages infused themselves into our mind. But LLVM has been in our live since so little time, and we haven’t really coded with it, and yet it seems to be an important source of solutions for problems he had earlier this year. Almost too good to be true.

The first thing that came to mind was that LLVM makes a perfect back-end. It fits the requirements: low-level enough to provide performance and control, and a special attention to performance as well. The C³ compiler code is planned to be flexible to support different back-ends, but it seems very likely that LLVM will be the first one.

But LLVM is not only a tool, its implementation contains some nice things too. The analysis and optimizations that LLVM makes on the SSA form (Static Single Assignment) is very inspiring. The algorithms behind this are very powerful and my husband want to adapt them for his own optimization system, or in short, apply them for high-level types. The list is very long, but to name a few:  ”Dead-code elimination”, “Constant propagation”, and “Combine redundant instructions”.

Good old C is also an inspiration. To be more specific, he really likes the way the abstractions of the language directly map on the different modern computer architectures. As he mentioned in his latest notes: the flexibility of a set of native abstractions (that may change between target machines!) may be the core element that will allow C³ to be the bridge toward the next generation of computers.

Syntax and types

I talked a lot about C++ as an inspiration. One feature of C++ that he wants to push beyond its current boundary is the ability for the user to create his own types. What he wants is to make user-defined types first-class citizens of the language. Int, float, long and double don’t have to be special cases. The language architecture is done in a way that allows every type to be used without additional limitations, optimized as much as intrinsic types would have been.

The C++ syntax is a familiar one but flawed in so many ways, especially the type declaration syntax. Bjarne Stroustrup admit himself that he kept it this way only for backward compatibility with C. It is a mess to parse and some contradictions have led to many debates: do I put my * with the pointee type or with the pointer name? But yet many languages like Java and D continue to use it as an inspiration for syntax, C³ as well. The reality is that the C++ syntax contains everything necessary for a good syntax and people love it! It just need a good clean-up. My husband describes the C³ syntax as a “naive” version of the C++ syntax, which means what you would think the syntax is intuitively instead of the one you discover in the field.

Multiple paradigms

Having multiple paradigms is a major aspect that my husband want to push farther. Being able to mix and match different programming styles with the same language is a rare quality that we love in C++. Some believe in purity of style, we believe that the right toolbox has a variety of tools that cover most situations, and even allows you to build your own!

One of these tools is generic programming. In C++, it is a powerful but complex style. Templates have allowed for this to be possible by decoupling the algorithms from the data structures they are processing. Inspired by the writings of Alex Stepanov and his work on STL, my husband intends to make generic programming something more intuitive, for example with the unification of static and dynamic polymorphism.

My husband often says that functional programming is an important part of C³ with the use of functions and closures. In C³ it is done with a “function” type that allows functions to be assigned to variable (that means support for closures as well). When I think about LISP, I think about parenthesis. But reading the essays of Paul Graham, I have to admit that functional programming can often be the best tool for the job, especially if the syntax is made convivial. An unexpected inspiration that has lots of potential.

Not only does he plan the unification of static and dynamic polymorphism, he is planning the unification of imperative and functional programming as well, isn’t it interesting…

So many…

Each of these elements would be worthy of a post by themselves, and there are so many other inspirations, aside from those we are not even conscious about! Great languages already exist and we have so much to learn from them. I find it very exciting to delve in this complex but so fascinating field that is programming language design. And just in case you worry about the impact of all this in our couple, we do talk about C³ often but we still try to get some things done, we are almost over with the wedding thanks cards. I know we are very late on this… Better late than never!