The Comet Programming Language
Comet was created with the help of Crafting Interpreters by Bob Nystrom
Comet is in the C family of languages and is object-oriented. It liberally borrows from other languages, such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript to name a few. I’ve tried to keep the semantics unsurprising and the novelty-factor low. So why would you want to use this instead of say, Python, Ruby or JavaScript?
- It’s small. At less than 2MB (including the standard libary in a single executable) it’s ideal for an embedded environment
- It’s a self-contained language. Many scripting languages require you to understand the low-level C programming
techniques in order to use them (like the file modes for fopen, or the socket dance). I’ve attempted to abstract
those APIs into a more naturally comet style.
- It’s learned from (some of) the mistakes of some of its inspirational languages
- Ruby’s heavy use of optional syntax often makes it difficult to understand what’s happening
- Python attempts to search large portions of the filesystem when it imports modules
- JavaScript’s type-coercion makes for error-prone code
- C’s (lack of) memory management is one of the major sources of security bugs in the world
- Python’s dogmatic approach to whitespace means that many useful constructs just aren’t reasonable to implement
- C#’s empty
throw; statement is often forgotten
- JavaScript’s many exceptions to the rule make programming it very error-prone
- Java’s verbose syntax make it very unfriendly to programmers and keyboards alike
- C++’s compilation rules and templating system make reasoning about programs very challenging
Drawbacks
- Currently, the math operations are very slow. Because of how operator overloading is implemented, all math operations incur the cost of an object function call with virtual method resolution.
- The garbage collection is pretty basic, naive and slow. For every garbage collection, we iterate through every object in the system, which is much more than necessary. A relatively straight forward improvement would be to implement a generational system. Also, all memory operations on all threads come to a halt when the GC is running (which essentially means all execution stops).