The Goose Programming Language

Btw I made the language, AMA. repo: https://github.com/aardappel/goose

The very first point under your tutorial is factually incorrect. var words: u8[][>..] = []; for i in 5 { words.push(str("word", i)); } In C++ that is a vector<string>: one heap allocation for the vector, one per string, a pointer and a capacity per element, and a walk over all of them when it goes out of scope. The example you've provided uses strings that are eligible for small string optimization, which avoids per-string allocation. All mainstream STL implementations perform this optimization. You can read about several implementations here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230803-00/?p=10...

I'm curious, for someone more familiar with Goose: how do you represent an arbitrary number of dynamically sized values? If you have a fixed number of stacks, it seems like only a fixed number of values can change size at any given time. For instance, how would you represent a hash table where the values are strings and at random, the program inserts or deletes a random string? This doesn't seem like something you could easily represent. The only way I can think of is to keep a stack that holds all of your strings, and you periodically compact it. Edit: Maybe you could also have a separate stack for strings of various sizes. One each for strings less than 8, 16, ... bytes. But at that point you're basically implementing your own malloc by hand. Edit: Fwiw I do think Goose is very cool! I've had to hand-roll a lot of similar stuff in Rust before to speed up memory management

This looks very interesting! I mostly write in garbage-collected languages (to the extent that I still write anything by hand...) so I'm just a spectator in memory management debates, but it's often struck me that heap management is more of an art than a science. The idea of treating memory more like stacks made immediate intuitive sense to me. I'm also fascinated by the thread implementation, although I'm not knowledgeable enough to to think through the potential benefits/costs vs other approaches to concurrency. I wonder if the name of the language was inspired by the way geese fly in formation, with trailing birds saving energy by flying inside the aerodynamic shadow of the leaders, and swapping in and out as needed. If so, a very nice metaphor for the memory management model. I was also impressed by the documentation. As we know AI-generted docs tends to be rather mediocre, but the author has clearly invested time in making in readable such that the relevance and rationale of design decisions provide the context that a curious programmer needs to understand why things are implemented in a particular way. I really appreciated the detailed samples, ranging from simple algorithmic theorems up to a small game. Again, I don't have the experience to rate the language vs others, but I was struck by readable the code was and how easy it was to follow task flow. Not having to think about classes is always a plus! Anyway, I usually the the offering of a new language with dispassionate interest, as something to be aware of and but not get too invested in or familiar with until it gains enough popularity to have a good shot at longevity. Goose is the first language in a long time where I looked at it and immediately thought that I'd like to use it for its own sake.

Goose is pretty cool. The idea is that you don’t need to make representable all programs: a language for a restricted purpose is ok. As long as you can statically specify the number of growable memory regions, you can use Goose. However, since there’s no garbage collection, you’ll probably need to be careful about memory use while a program is running. Ie: the stacks can get too big if you keep growing them, even as old data is not used any more. Still, for a large number of programs - like data-oriented applications - it’s probably a good fit. It might work ok with entity-component game systems as long as you reuse old memory…