Good questions! The short answer to the first is that the language is interpreted, not compiled, so optimizations are moot.
Aliases are strongly-typed which helps avoid some issues. Memory mods come with the territory —- if ‘a’ and ‘b’ point to the same array and ‘a’ resizes that array, then the array behind ‘b’ gets resized too. The one tricky situation is when ‘a’ and ‘b’ each reference range of elements, not the whole array, because a resize of ‘a’ would force a resize of the width of ‘b’. Resizing in this case is usually not allowed.
Garbage collection is indeed done (poorly) by reference counting, and also (very well) by a tracing function that Cicada’s command line script runs after every command.
You’re exactly right, the library is lean because I figure it’s easy to add a C function interface for any capability you want. There’s a bit of personal bias as to what I did include - for example all the basic calculator functions are in, right down to atan(), but no regex. Basic IO (save, load, input, print) is included.
Type marshaling — the Cicada int/float types are defined by cicada.h and can be changed! You just have to use the same types in your C code.
When you run Cicada you pass a list of C functions paired with their Cicada names: { “myCfunction”, &myCfunction }. Then, in Cicada, $myCfunction() runs the callback.
Thanks for the questions! This is exactly the sort of feedback that helps me learn more about the landscape..
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Yes there are lots of runtime checks.. unfortunately, but I always fork the time-consuming calculations into C anyway so those checks don’t really affect overall performance much.
Scripted functions have no set arity, and the same applies to callback C functions. Scripted functions collect their arguments inside an ‘args’ variable. Likewise, each C function has a single ‘argsType’ argument which collects the argument pointers & type info, and there are macros to help unpack them but if you want to do the unpacking manually then the function can be called variadically:
ccInt myCfunction(argsType args)
{ for (int a = 0; a < args.num; a++) printf(“%p\n”, args.p[a]); return 0; }
So all functions are automatically variadic.
It’s good to know that these GC/etc. solutions are even used by the big languages..
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Yes and the simplicity extends to function definitions too, since you don’t have to specify any type info. E.g.
f :: { ; print(args) }
Brevity is especially nice for inline/anonymous functions.
You can definitely use args.num, args.type[], and args.indices[] to figure out which optional parameters were passed, but I’ve decided that it’s usually easier to pass a full set of parameters into C and have the scripted wrapper handle the optional params. This is easy in Cicada because of ‘code substitution’ (one of the innovations I’m proudest of and if you’ve seen this elsewhere please let me know!). Example:
callC :: {
}Then you can call it with or without modifying the optional parameters from their default values.
callC(2, 3) | uses the default string
callC(2, 3; str = “modified param”)
callC() runs its arguments as a function, substituted into the params variable, allowing the arguments to modify params. This is weird and I haven’t seen it elsewhere, but it’s very useful.
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