What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I've written in past threads, but I am writing my own language/runtime/shell/os after the past decade of forcing all languages into my weird format with minimal success. It's my dream language. There is no need for manual memory management, GC, or reference counters (all instantiated memory is dropped at the end of the functional use) and comes with enhanced debugging (all variables and functions that are touched are automatically logged and able to be 'replayed' on demand) with an integrated vfs database.

It's a compiled language with the host language written in Fortran, and should be about as fast as C (+/- 20% for overhead and linking). There is also no need for a lexer or parser in the most conventional sense, so compilation time should be about equal to Fortran¹, which is a hair faster than C in most cases. Because it's host language is modern Fortran 2018, it will feature parallel computing by default². Syntax is heavily inspired by Powershell. The plan is to be available as a single portable executable, and shouldn't be larger than 10mb with a few hundred keywords by the time we reach 1.0. Verbosity over the implicit.

I have the core of the language working, a shell/repl implementation kind of working, and the debugging and compilation architecture design finished (as much as it can be until I can optimize and rework it).

It's progressing really well, but life gets in the way. Hoping for a mature alpha release by spring.

This is my grand "twenty-year project". I want to still be working on this in twenty years, rather happily. It's a new-type of language design and implementation.

For those that may ask, it's certainly not object-oriented, and not quite functional either, so I've just started to explaining it as an 'automation language'. It is general purpose, but both high level and low at the same time, I want this to be able to be written in the same way on embedded devices such as the ESP32, or on large outdated and modern clustered mainframes and servers with relative ease without sacrificing the language itself.

I haven't really had anyone to talk about this endeavor, thus the overly long response, if you're interested, let me know by using the rather simple hint I've included in this comment - we all should have some whimsy in our life, y'know? Progress will be slow, but that is how I want it to be.

^1. The 'compilation' model is similar to Forth with something I've been calling precognitive direct interpretation, similar to AOT/JIT designs. The closest similarity in other languages may be Smalltalk.

^2, Fortrans parallel-by-default design is just monumentally better than async/await adhoc additions in other languages, modern fortran is crazy fast and fantastic, totally slept on language. There is a reason it's used in the HPC space at the top of the programming and data intensive world. Really easy to write/read language as well.

Edit: Added more details on compilation and design, added twenty year project aside.

🧙‍♂️

I pushed another release of repeatTest on Friday and continued working on performance, adding a couple new benchmarks for things that were particularly slow when doing searches. I started out fixing whatever looks slow in a profile, but the big improvements were from making the brute-force search algorithm somewhat smarter in cases I care about. Here are my notes with benchmark results.

And, finally, started writing documentation. Here's the page on Getting Started.

(Skimming it now, it seems rather terse.)

I modified my fish shell prompt config to generate a random color based on the hostname when SSH is active:

$ cat .config/fish/config.fish
...
set fish_color_host_remote (~/bin/str_rgb.py $hostname)

$ cat .config/fish/functions/fish_prompt.fish
...
set -l color_host $fish_color_host
if set -q SSH_TTY
    set color_host $fish_color_host_remote
end
...
set_color $color_host
printf '%s ' "whatever you want"
set_color normal

I was struggling to write the following code inside of fish. But since this only runs once at startup I'm okay with it running in python:

$ cat bin/str_rgb.py
#!/usr/bin/python3
import colorsys
import hashlib
import sys

def string_to_rgb(input_string):
    hash_object = hashlib.md5(input_string.encode())
    hash_hex = hash_object.hexdigest()
    hash_int = int(hash_hex, 16)

    hue = hash_int % 360  # Hue is between 0 and 359
    saturation = 30 + (hash_int // 360) % 50  # Saturation is between 30 and 79
    lightness = 30 + (hash_int // (360 * 50)) % 50  # Lightness is between 30 and 79

    r, g, b = colorsys.hls_to_rgb(hue / 360, lightness / 100, saturation / 100)

    r = int(r * 255)
    g = int(g * 255)
    b = int(b * 255)

    return r, g, b

rgb_color = string_to_rgb(sys.argv[1])
print('%02x%02x%02x' % rgb_color)