I have my own language I'm working on in private and it's nice to see other people coming to the same conclusion on region based memory. I was heavily influenced 7 years ago from learning from HandmadeHero and the community around it, and so I made that memory model one of my goals from the start, and it is indeed possible to get very fast programming with it when you make it your default, and when you make the language able to statically analyze it more.
That is about where our similarities end, though, since I'm doing quite a lot of other stuff in the midst as well (much heavier type stuff, fully incremental, retargetable, reflection, integer range tracking, blah blah blah), and the more goals you have, the complexity blows up exponentially. I do think that the region based memory part alone is worthwhile to have as a language feature, so I applaud your pragmatism. I like your syntax for returning through call stacks, too.
There are other languages that do this, though. Did you look into any of the others? Or ones like Odin which give you the configurable bump allocators and scratch space as well? Mainly I'm curious about your opinions of prior art.
it's too late to edit but i saw the prior art on github now https://github.com/aardappel/goose/blob/master/docs/design/p...
anyway, hope this project goes well! the secret of the arena allocator seems to be out now to the mainstream. I think this is also a strength of array programming languages in the tradition of APL/J/K/Q.
As this project develops, I'll get to benefit from your public crowd sourced testing and design before having to publicize mine :P
Yeah, my language in development uses only arenas for memory management too. But this Goose language is next level.