Fancy

Emerging Languages Camp

2010

Christopher Bertels
chris@fancy-lang.org
www.fancy-lang.org
 Motivation
● Many Language implementations
● Not very well documented
● Hard to read and understand if you're new to this stuff
● Lots of magic

● Fancy
● Focus on documentation for potential language implementors
● Easy and simple semantics
● Newcomer friendly
● Having fun working on the implementation side
– Not just as a language end-user
 Inspiration
● Smalltalk
● Everything's an Object
● Pure message sending
– Small amount of special keywords and syntax
– Simple message sending semantics
● Dynamic, class-based OO
● Metaprogramming
● Reflective
 Inspiration
● Ruby
● File based (instead of image based as Smalltalk)
● Embrace Unix
● TIMTOWTDI
● Similar literal syntax
● Class definition is executable script
– Stuff similar to attr_accessor etc.
● But: Fixed some inconsistencies within Ruby
– e.g. Blocks ↔ Procs ↔ Lambdas
 Inspiration
● Erlang
● Message passing concurrency semantics
● Light-weight processes
● Note: Still needs to be implemented
 First Class is good
● Classes, Methods, ...
● e.g. Object Documentation
● Classes
● Methods
● Tests (Runnable Documentation)
 FancySpec
● Simplified clone of RSpec
● ~ 100 lines of Fancy
● Tests for all built-in classes & methods
● Not dependent on implementation
FancySpec
Classes & Methods
 Blocks
● Ruby has some weird inconsistencies
● Example: Symbol to Proc
 Some other features
● Dynamic scoping
● Simple method caching
● Define logic based on sender of the message
● e.g. private, protected & public methods
● Exception Handling
● Currently uses C++'s mechanisms in the
background :(
 Current Stats and Goals
● ~ 9k LOC C++
● ~ 3k LOC Fancy
● ~ 1600 LOC Stdlib in Fancy
● ~ 1500 LOC FancySpecs
● Small native core
● As much in Fancy as possible
● Be reasonably fast (getting there)
● Be easy to understand & well documented
 Coming soon
● Running on Rubinius VM
● Self-hosting compiler written in Fancy
● Message passing concurrency using Rubinius'
channels
● Continuations
– Restarts, Signals, Exception Handling ...
● It's a nice fit semantically
 Summary
● Simple and small language implementation
● Easy to get started with
● It's fun
● @emerginglangs rocks!
 http://fancy-lang.org

http://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy

#fancy @ irc.freenode.org