Translating a language into a different language is a popular thing to do these days, but still not a very easy one. I feel it's like peeling an infinite onion of misery. First, you write a parser of your source language, figure out the translation of the instructions, and emit the code in the target language, and you're very happy when your translated Hello world compiles.

Then, a user (like me) tries writing something like

  package main
  
  func main() {
    register := 42
    println(register)
  }

well, oops.

  /tmp/solod_build3904763637/main.c: In function 'main':
  /tmp/solod_build3904763637/main.c:6:21: error: expected identifier or '(' before '=' token
      6 |     so_int register = 42;
        |                     ^
  /tmp/solod_build3904763637/main.c:7:29: error: expected expression before 'register'
      7 |     so_println("%" PRIdINT, register);
        |                             ^~~~~~~~ (exit status 1)

OK, now you grab the list of reserved words of the target language, which is not always an easy thing to do, and rename type names and variables as needed.

The next bad thing is when you step on your own toes and see that the new names you invented, like `so_int` or `so_println`, will inevitably pollute the global namespace. We'll either cross our fingers and hope that no one will create a variable named `so_int`, or we'll need to add all our new kind-of-reserved words to our already big list of exceptions.

I'm sure there are multiple levels of complexity beyond this.

Not trying to say that seeing a bunch of new translators from language A to language B is bad: not at all! It really seems that this is one of the popular usages of the agents, and a rewarding one. But doing it without hidden bugs is kinda hard.

That seems like a brittle approach to transpilation. A transpiler should translate all of the language's semantics, including resolving identifiers as symbols, and then choose legal names for them in the target language. Also, there is so much more to a language than its surface syntax.

I've never designed a transpiler (I'm not a programmer), but surely the correct approach is to transform the source code into its type-checked AST, and then translate to the target language from there?

> A transpiler should translate all of the language's semantics, including resolving identifiers as symbols, and then choose legal names for them in the target language.

Yes, it should; but it also makes things much more difficult. This specific transpiler indeed builds an AST, but does not care about identifiers, just emitting them as is [1] (I hope I found the correct place in the code).

[1]: https://github.com/solod-dev/solod/blob/8485bc867ae0f0269d75...

The "a better C" meme needs to die. It's ill defined. Everyone wants something different. For me, GC disqualifies any language as a better C. Bjarne Stroustrup promoted C++ as a better C. But C++ killed off some of C's killer low-level features like type-punning via unions. Indeed it's only in recent years that low-level memory manipulation, such as std::start_lifetime_as and the implicit lifetime rules were standardised. The whole strict aliasing fiasco made C and C++ permenantly worse. Some people say Zig is a better C, but it is certainly not a minimal language, if that's how you define better. For me a better C would have an abstract model that matched machine-level memory access (i.e. no type-based alias analysis) would be as minimal as C in terms of feature set, would clean up C warts like operator precedence, and would be as deterministic as possible (e.g. deterministic memory layout, including bit fields, would be possible without hacks)...

John Regehr tried to start an initiative to make what he called Friendly C, removing some of the most blatant C footguns, and even that turned out to be extremely hard to get consensus on: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1287

What do you think of Ada's representation clauses and Zig's packed structs? Do they give you the syntax and semantics for arrangement (ordering, padding, widths), endianness, and control of bit order that you want?

Also, thank you for an educational comment.

Edit: I forgot to ask about your thoughts on Ada's and Zig's type punning.

The idea of using a subset of an existing popular language is very wise IMHO. We can (and apparently are) debating the merits of the language runtime, but what a subset gives you is immediate access to a large pile of existing tooling that you'd have to write yourself, eg linters, formatters, lsps, etc. Stuff that is purely source-oriented.

That hadn't really occurred to me before.

Go is a better C already, designed by C authors themselves, with other UNIX key figures.

Which while some of the design decisions might be debatable, they actually knew what C is all about, informed by their own experience with what worked in C, Alef and Limbo, across UNIX, Plan 9 and Inferno.

Go is not a better C, in the sense that you cannot write an OS with it. Runtime, GC, etc.

But Go is a better language for many programs that were often written in C: network servers, CLI utilities, TUI utilities, etc.

Plenty of OSes, since Xerox PARC days have been written in GC systems languages.

Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Cedar, Topaz, Oberon, Active Oberon, Singularity, Midori, Ironclad

Go's runtime is written in Go.

The whole compiler toolchain, GC, compiler, linker, Assembler, is written in Go.

There are Go compilers for bare metal, no OS needed, like TinyGo, the runtime, written in Go is the OS.

I love the "you cannot write an OS in a GC language" discourse.

It isn't only a mainstream thing because everyone only cares about UNIX clones.

The fact that people care a lot about Unix clones is significant, though. nine_k could have been more effective in arguing the point, but it seems like a strong point to argue. Do you think you Go is flexible enough to write a Unix clone with performance equivalent to a C-unix? If so, why has it not been done?

Besides the sibling Biscuit, maybe because no one bothered to do it?

As simple as that, not everyone of us is a Linus.

I should also point out that if you are using a Mac, changes are its iBoot Safe C might already been replaced by Embedded Swift, a GC enabled systems language.

Chapter 5 of The Garbage Collection Handbook, or A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection paper for the incoming replies related to RC.

People care about UNIX clones because they are lazy, UNIX has the source code available, and an existing ecosystem that they don't want to replicate, so it always ends up being yet another clone, thus throwing away all the possible innovations.

We see this happening even with Haiku, Genode, Redox OS, or Windows now shipping alongside Linux on top of Hyper-V.

Unless one is an Apple or Google, with the money and will power to push something out the door, using Objective-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin, with plain C and C++ standard libraries, and even then people will bend backwards to put UNIX into those systems, even when the platform owners went to great effort to hide it under the official userspace APIs.

There is Biscuit from OSDI 2018 https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/projects/biscuit.html

> Go's runtime is written in Go. The whole compiler toolchain, GC, compiler, linker, Assembler, is written in Go.

There's some nuance to this. The runtime code uses specific compiler support and restrictions that are not ordinary Go - possible (or even done, like this case) ≠ ergonomic. No doubt of course that for the Go project, this is still a win.

The larger runtime makes bootstrapping go for unsupported architectures more laborious than C, but it's not a hard blocker. The function call overhead for inline assembly feels like more of an issue doing close to hw programming. It can be avoided for the runtime, but user go code can't escape it afaik.

The author's original blog post, which goes into some more detail: https://antonz.org/solod

> So is for Go developers who want systems-level control without learning a new language. And for C programmers who like Go's safety, structure, and tooling.

Wut?

Also, how do you preserve garbage collector semantics without garbage collector?

The answer is apparently "you don't":

- Everything in the language is statically allocated or stack-allocated. You have to call a malloc / free function to get heap allocated things

- The language is not memory safe (you can't return slices, pointers, or interface types from a function if the thing was created inside the function, unless you used heap allocation)

- Interfaces (the only variable size struct Go has) are implemented by creating a struct of function pointers. Arrays and maps (the non-struct variable size types) are implemented as stack-only and maps are limited to 1024 keys. You can opt into heap-based arrays / maps in the standard library to bypass this.

So much for "Go's safety" in the quote above. Ok, it doesn't explicitly say memory safety, but what other safety could if be referring to?

comparing it with c? thread safety maybe?

It sounds incredibly dangerous in the hands of a usual go programmer who has no idea what the difference between the stack and the heap is.

Been a while since I used go but I remember it being kind of uniquely hard to tell? Like a struct is on the stack, but a *struct is maybe on the heap, depending on escape analysis?

I doubt that it can. so in addition to C's quirks (which I know about), I have to care about go's quirks and solod's quirks as well? and for what? there's no solod-to-regular-go interop aiui, so just some tooling and the standard library?

How does it deal with pointers if everything is stack based? You can't really return a pointer to something on the stack because it could get overwritten between when you return it and when you access it.

Exactly as well as C does, it seems.

    func newPerson() *Person {
        p := Person{Name: "Alice", Age: 30}
        return &p
    }

becomes

    static main_Person* newPerson(void) {
        main_Person p = (main_Person){.Name = so_str("Alice"), .Age = 30};
        return &p;
    }

Quoting the FAQ: "So itself has few safeguards other than the default Go type checking. It will panic on out-of-bounds array access, but it won't stop you from returning a dangling pointer or forgetting to free allocated memory. Most memory-related problems can be caught with AddressSanitizer in modern compilers, so I recommend enabling it during development by adding -fsanitize=address to your CFLAGS."

So saying you get the "safety of Go" is a bit of a stretch.

That's undefined behavior in C I thought? You're addressing the memory of a stack frame that already collapsed when it returned. I think it's ok for compilers to either segfault or work like you'd think they would for that example in C.

You can pass pointers to earlier frames in the stack, they're still active, but you can't return a pointer to an expired stack frame.

Yeah that's not great. It's easy to be faster than go if you haven't thought about memory management yet. I bet go with GOGC=off is faster than plain go too.

Well, it does say:

"Everything is stack-allocated by default; heap is opt-in through the standard library."

So it supports both stack and heap, and I guess static allocation too.

Arn't goroutines the killer feature of go? Don't see how you'd get them with this approach.

At first glance looks like stipped C++ with minor differences. For example go have row polimorphism compared to OOP in C++. What else is there that C++ does not have?

I really like this idea. I was reading a post earlier about how Go generics are implemented, and how they're sort of leveraging root GC-types in the "runtime" to avoid the same bloat as monomorphization causes in, say, C++. I wonder how Solod will do that? I guess plain monomorphization? I guess that's fine since C compilers are so speedy.

I've been using Go and Raylib to make a game lately and I really don't have a problem with garbage collection. It's so fast that it's not having an impact on my frame rate.

I was a little worried at the start because nobody would normally consider Go for games, but I did a bunch of tests and found it's just no big deal.

(I'm focused on game play and not interested in pushing hardware to its limits.)

I’ve been considering using Odin and Raylib for this because of its similarities to Go, but using Go itself is appealing. Do you have any good resources for what you’ve learned, or is it an unexplored frontier?

I’ve used Odin and Raylib for some prototypes, and it’s terrific!

I don't know If I can be very helpful, I'm using gen2brain's binding [1].

I started about a year ago asking the AI very beginner questions about Go and 3d math. I think it did steer me down some wrong path sometimes and of course I did some dumb things myself too. I'm not using Agents, just asking questions about features, then writing the code myself by hand.

I really like the power of the tools and the constraints of the language in Go. It's been fun so far.

[1] https://github.com/gen2brain/raylib-go

It's interesting you would mention Odin because I spend a fair amount of time playing with it as well. It was easy to get started and fun. Fast, easy to iterate. The reason I moved away was not the language itself, but I felt it was too much Ginger Bills baby. Oh, and managing memory is no fun. I want to make game play, not think about allocations :)

It cannot be a better C. You cannot implement exceptions in it using set jump for example, but the biggest problem is memory management. You can't implement your own arena allocator in golang.

To be fair, you don't need to implement exceptions in golang because they already exist in the language, they're just called panics

Indeed, but I guess OP is saying that the panics are not supported in this language.

I've drastically sped up commercial shipping C code by implementing arena allocators and Go is my daily driver and it's not clear to me why you're making this claim.

Not the OP but I guess what they are saying is that since this language is a subset of go and if you use it as such then an arena allocator cannot be used in the transliterated code.

Maybe it's possible to force the transliteration to use a different allocator and then you could use the one you wrote in C?

i've been using Go on backend now all the time.

Wish something like this existed instead i am stuck with flutter and react native on Mobile.

When will a time come when i can use some functional languages like Haskell or a plain boring language like Go for making apps with OTA ability for mobiles.

As vibe coding takes over, app store approval will become slowerer and OTA is really great when you need to make quick changes!

You can OTA each day and do base app release to store once each week.

i think this maybe the space where very little work is being done.

Not sure of your exact constraints but is something like this useful?

https://hyperview.org/

Insert Look What They Need To Mimic A Fraction Of Our Power meme here.

This is a very exciting project; love writing go with the tooling, but I miss writing C from my getting started days

Yet another attempt to reinvent a better C. Curious, but unpractical. If one need a better C, C++ should be used instead.

C++ is like PHP: it used to be a terrible language, and you can still reach for everything terrible if you wish. But during last maybe 10 years, C++ made a lot of effort to become a language with fewer footguns and more safe, high-level tools.

Still I won't start a new project in C++. If I wanted high-level features and zero-cost abstractions, I'd take Rust. If I wanted working really close to hardware, do bit-twiddling and knowing where every byte is allocated, I'd take Zig. If I wanted to write a small piece of code intended to run absolutely everywhere, including old and esoteric architectures, I would still have to go with C (plain, old).

> If I wanted working really close to hardware, do bit-twiddling and knowing where every byte is allocated, I'd take Zig

Why not C++? It allows as many low-level operations as one wishes, but don't forces you to manage memory manually where it isn't necessary.

> If I wanted to write a small piece of code intended to run absolutely everywhere

GCC and Clang have support of C++ since many years. Is there any modern platform for which no GCC or Clang backend exist?

> Yet another attempt to reinvent a better C. Curious, but unpractical. If one need a better C, C++ should be used instead.

Those two languages are on the opposite ends of any complexity scale. Someone looking for a better C has a ton of options before getting to "lets use C++ and ask our devs to practice discipline".