Dao Programming Language for Scripting and ComputingΒΆ
| Authors: | Limin Fu |
|---|---|
| Time: | 13:40 |
| Session: | https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/dao-programming-language-for-scripting-and-computing |
| Link: | http://daovm.net/ |
| Slides: |
Dao is a language Fu developed in his spare time. It was initially motivated by frustration with Perl. That frustration made him curious about language design and implementation. Around the same time he wanted a better language for bioinformatics, and Dao was a way to get that. Since then the goal has evolved to providing a general purpose language with some advanced features in a small runtime. Dao emphasizes consistent and reasonable syntax, simple interface for extending and embedding, good numeric efficiency, and good support for multiple cores.
Dao supports:
- optional type annotations, with type inference and static type checking,
- BNF-like syntax macros for adding new language features,
- and anonymous functions,
among others (slides list more complete features).
tup = ( 123, 'abc' )
tup : tuple<int, string> = (123, 'abc')
Because Dao does some type inferencing and compile time checks, it does some interesting things at compile time: if you call a function in two places, once with a string and once with an int, you get two specialized copies in the copmiled output: one for ints and one for strings.
[Demonstrates lots of Dao features, including concurrency primitives.]
The Dao JIT backend is based on LLVM. It only supports a subset of the Dao VM instructions, so some programs won’t be sped up with the current implementation.
ClangDao provides an easy way to bind C/C++ libraries into Clang.