Progress report in Pen programming language

October 2, 2022

@raviqqe

Agenda

• Progress report
  • String concatenation
  • Debug function
• Next plans

Progress report

String concatenation

• Pen now has a string concatenation operator (+.)
• Multiple string concatenations are batched into one.

concatenateStrings = \(ss [string]) string {
  if [s, ...ss] = ss {
    s() + concatenateStrings(ss)
  } else {
    ""
  }
}

Debug function

• debug built-in function pretty-prints values of any types.
  • \(any) none
• Work is still in progress.
  • Primitive, record, and union types are done.

foo = \() none {
  xs = [number 1, 2, 3]

  debug(xs)
}

Output:

[number 1, 2, 3]

Type information

• Pen compiles AST -> HIR -> MIR -> F-- -> LLVM IR -> assembly.
• Pen previously had no HIR-level type information.
  • But only at the MIR level.
• We need to inject custom type information for reflection from HIR to MIR.
  • e.g. debug function

Type information

Internal representation

Variants:

Type information

Internal representation

Type information:

Next plan

• Bug fixes on macOS
• Refactoring...

Summary

• Progress
  • String concatenation
  • Debug function
• Next plans