[HN Gopher] Wax compiler - a tiny language designed to transpile...
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Wax compiler - a tiny language designed to transpile to other
languages
Author : shakna
Score : 57 points
Date : 2024-04-20 05:05 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waxc.netlify.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (waxc.netlify.app)
| lioeters wrote:
| > The goal of wax is to be a "common subset" of most major
| imperative programming languages. By lacking the unique fancy
| features in each of these languages and being as boring as
| possible, wax transpiles to all of them seamlessly
|
| I love the concept. I was recently studying a very small language
| called "subscript", with a similar idea they called "common
| syntax".
|
| > Subscript supports common syntax (shared by JavaScript,C, C++,
| Java, C#, PHP, Swift, Objective-C, Kotlin, Perl etc.)
|
| https://github.com/dy/subscript
|
| ---
|
| Lingdong Huang, the author of Wax language, is a genuine artist
| of software. His projects are a feast.
|
| https://lingdong.works/
|
| https://github.com/LingDong-
|
| A programming language in Classical Chinese. First person shooter
| controlled by facial expressions. Procedurally generated flowers,
| fish drawings, imaginary creatures, landscape paintings,
| calligraphy. In my mind, he's up there in the Olympian heights
| with Fabrice Bellard, Justine Tunney, etc., in terms of technical
| mastery and innovative thinking.
|
| ---
|
| Here's a screenshot from a project called Image Sequencer, to
| programmatically sequence crowd-sourced images into gifs.
|
| https://lingdong.works/media/imgseq.png
|
| Or this project called chinese-radical-vis, visualizations &
| animations of Chinese ideograms and radicals.
|
| > Each Chinese character is described as a combination of
| components. These components can be other characters or radicals,
| as well as _building blocks_ , which defines the simplest shapes
| that make up every component. Combination can be applied
| recursively to describe ever more complex glyphs.
|
| https://chinese-radical-vis.glitch.me/
|
| I love this kind of interdisciplinary synthesis, with a visual
| and conceptual beauty.
| karmakaze wrote:
| This sounds perfect for LLMs. Then all the imperative languages
| have a shared Rosetta stone entry for everything.
| bbkane wrote:
| How does this compare to using wasm to communicate between
| languages?
| chirsz wrote:
| This remineds me of Haxe[1]. I like Wax better because of the
| Common-Lisp-like syntax.
|
| [1]: https://haxe.org
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Yeah I thought of Haxe immediately. I've never used Haxe for
| anything serious, I know some people were using it to port
| Flash games, but I'm not sure if its used for more than just
| that.
| zem wrote:
| seems like the opposite philosophy to haxe - insofar as you
| want to draw a line between "compiling" and "transpiling", haxe
| falls firmly on the compilation side, whereas wax is focused on
| more of a direct source translation approach
| garyrob wrote:
| Here's a link to the language itself. Hasn't been updated in a
| couple years, unfortunately. Maybe getting some attention here
| could help. The README says: "wax is currently experimental, so
| there might be bugs as well as aspects to be improved, in which
| case PR and Issues are very much appreciated."
|
| https://github.com/LingDong-/wax
| idle_zealot wrote:
| This isn't directly related to Wax as a language, but I quite
| like the formatting used for S expressions on this page. It's
| much more pleasant than the typical train-of-closed-paren I
| normally see lisps formatted with, at least to my C-formatting-
| accustomed eyes.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| How does it compare to e.g. fusion-lang? Does anyone actually use
| any of the "universal languages" in production?
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(page generated 2024-04-20 23:02 UTC)