Programming language Dino and its implementation
18 comments
·June 5, 2025johnisgood
extrabajs
Guessing from the text that they’re running the (interactive) bytecode compiler + interpreter version of OCaml, which is much slower.
ghurtado
Feature-wise it looks very complete / modern.
It seems to have a pretty high ratio of "I use X because it's the only one that has Y" type features, all in one place. Very appealing to Python users, since it fills a few well known language gaps.
90s_dev
What do you mean, George?
> It seems to have a pretty high ratio of "I use X because it's the only one that has Y" type features, all in one place.
ghurtado
My name is certainly not George :D but I'll pick two features:
- fibers
- advanced pattern matching
These are two not so common language features that are often the differentiator in a class of languages: "I like Python - but Ruby has fibers" or "I like Ruby - but Python has pattern matching"
To see such features all in one language has a lot of appeal (to me, anyway)
dleslie
FYI, Janet has fibers and parsing expression grammars. Many scheme implementations also feature some form of pattern matching.
riffraff
Is there something missing in ruby's pattern matching? It has subpatterns, alternation, pinning, guards.
I've got limited experience with it but it seems on par with what most languages have.
bravesoul2
Cool. A golike from 1993 with a similar name to a certain modern JS runner.
pjmlp
That would be Oberon-2.
90s_dev
How is it like Go? It seems differenter.
bravesoul2
C-like with slices
90s_dev
Doesn't C have slices but they're just kind of manual and non ergonomic and memory unsafe?
null
zem
looks like a very pleasant and capable language! honestly not what I was expecting given the origin story as a game scripting language.
Lerc
I was not expecting to feel as sad as I did after seeing the name Animatek after all these years.
If things are hard, seek help, please.
I do not know how to interpret the benchmarks. OCaml is really fast, so the numbers do not make sense to me, at a quick glance. Is it worse or better to Python or Ruby according to the benchmark? I would like to see the code, too, because if it is that much slower than Python or Ruby, then there is a serious problem with the implementation.