June Lang
published on 2024/05/08
For the last year and a half, I and my recently-added collaborator Jane Losare-Lusby have been working in secret on a safe systems language that could be learned about as quickly as one can learn Go. I think we might have something worth exploring.
We have a way of simplifying lifetimes, making for readable code that people from various languages should be able to understand and use. We can also give clear, easy-to-understand lifetime errors when they arise.
Having safe memory recycling gives us a way to keep groups and still offer things like delete in a linked list abstraction. It's convenient but not so automatic that we lose the visibility into the costs of memory management.
That said, there are still some challenge ahead that will need to be solved in the language design and tooling. For example, how do you know when the program is bloating memory? We'll need some way of doing a memory trace when the program is running to detect this and warn the developer.
I see this in a way as a more incremental/prototype-friendly way of development. June is always memory safe, but the first version of a program may not be as efficient as it could be in terms of memory usage. That's a process we often go through as developers. First, we "make it work" before we "make it good".