seaslug
small, beautiful, knowable, DOESN'T EXIST YET LOL
- non-turing complete, verified terminating code placed into well-defined interfaces similar to Erlang behaviors
- strongly typed, powerful inference to minimize type noise
- a runtime built from the beginning to take advantage of io_uring, immutable messaging, optimistic STM, and generally paying attention to modern scheduling research
- the runtime tracks overall utilization and saturation
- aims to maximize utilization while minimizing saturation (writes before reads before accepts for sockets)
- infers contention causality encountered in the optimistic state layer and learns to step in as
a traffic director, letting users avoid thinking about contention
- leans into linear logic to enforce error handling in well-specified hierarchies, similar to Erlang supervisors
- interpreter-first, but the interpreter itself aims to compile quickly so you can produce static optimized native binaries
- built-in first-class fault injection, fuzzing, network simulation, model-based testing, and concurrent interleaving exploration
- rich built-in data structures, first-class json support, first-class binary parsing support
seaslug should be an ideal language for building
- databases
- distributed systems
- servers
- scalable concurrent systems
- multitenant infrastructure
seaslug does not aim to excel at
- building your own data structures
- intensive numerical processing
- short-lived CLI applications
- embedded programming
ideas that may or may not lead to seaslug
- erlang's terseness, behaviors, focus on immutable message passing, explicit supervisor hierarchies, pattern matching, binary parsing capabilities
- celf's nondeterminism and linear logic
- constraint handling rules's verification opportunities
- prolog's declarative debugging, tables, provability of pure code
- total functional programming's restrictions on recursion and looping
seaslug is written in rust and takes advantage of things like
- io_uring
- simdjson
- sled
- software transactional memory