Show HN: Fuse – statically typed functional programming language

88 points - today at 11:23 AM


Hi HN! I've been working on the fuse programming language, it's a statically typed purely functional language with higher-kinder types and ad-hoc polymorphism. It compiles to the GRIN whole-program optimizer, producing LLVM-generated native code.

Fuse supports ADTs, Generics, Type Methods, Traits, Pattern matching etc. all in a functional style with no mutations.

I’ve been developing the language for 5 years, with code written in Scala. I’ve started coding the language from the base of System F that was implemented as part of the book: Types and Programming Languages (tapl). And then extending with concepts such as Bidirectional Type Checking with Higher-Rank Polymorphism.

I’ve mainly drawn inspiration from Rust, Haskell, Scala and Python (in terms of syntax). It all started because I wanted a language that has Rust-like concepts such as: ADT, Traits, Impl block syntax, etc. but have the pure functional semantics.

I'd would love feedback on the language design and its general usage.

Source

Comments

codebje today at 1:18 PM
It's nice to see a GRIN backend in the wild!

It looks like a tidy little functional language - a small, easily grasped syntax surface and generally clear semantics. That you've got it to the point that it can compile and run proper programs is a great achievement for a solo dev project!

The string type in the standard library isn't Unicode-aware, might be worth just noting that. Unicode support can be a big undertaking, but considering whether you'll add it later or not might affect your library design now.

I don't really understand why you have an IO monad. The language isn't pure - `.exec()` means any function can perform IO actions no matter its type signature - so what's IO really for?

Do `impl` additions export? What happens when two libraries add the same function name with different signatures (or just bodies!) to a type's `impl` ?

Is currying automatic? It doesn't seem to be, but, eg, the `sum(x: i32, y: i32)` function theoretically could be called as `sum(5)` to create a closure, but this isn't a documented feature if so.

The website's font is using ligatures, not unicode operator symbols - I'd personally find it much clearer to use a non-ligature font to show what's really there, but that's immaterial to the language.

norir today at 8:16 PM
I would suggest adding objective metrics. How fast is this compiler? How long is the longest fuse program? How long does it take to compile? How fast at runtime is the fuse implementation of several benchmark programs compared to semantically equivalent programs written in other languages?

How expressive is fuse? How long are equivalent programs written in fuse/rust/scala/haskell?

Can you show me a bug that the fuse compiler catches but some or all of the competition doesn't?

deepsun today at 7:57 PM
Off topic: what is the most convenient statically typed language that don't require compilation/transpilation? To run instead of bash or Python, but types are mandatory (not just hints like python).

I know jShell has been here like 10 years, but I'm not sure it's convenient to quickly write to a file, query a url, etc.

.ksh for Kotlin? Typescript (through Deno)? Lua?

Twey today at 2:50 PM
Love to see a real-world example of GRIN!

    trait Functor[A]:
      fun map[B](self, f: A -> B) -> Self[B];
This looks a little wacky to me. I see that you can write HKTs in their η-long form and refer to them unapplied (`Functor`). But I don't understand how I would use this syntax to attach something to the trait that _doesn't_ depend on `A`. For (a silly) example,

    trait SizedFunctor[A]: Functor[A]:
      type Size;
      fun size(self) -> Size;
How do I know that `List[A]::Size` is the same type as `List[B]::Size`?

Relatedly, I want to read `Self` in there as ‘the thing that implements `Functor[A]`’ (e.g. List[A]`), but that makes `Self[B]`, instantiated, mean `List[A][B]`, which I think should be a kind error.

helix278 today at 5:26 PM
Superficially, I find the syntax very untuitive to read. Most languages opt to use <> for typevariables. Is there a specific reason you chose to deviate from that and use []?
nee_oo_ru today at 3:34 PM
Congrats on the release! Really cool to see a working GRIN backend. I'm definitely bookmarking this to give it a spin as soon as I get some spare time.
toplinesoftsys today at 6:12 PM
Great project - clean and simple syntax, pure functional language, uses GRIN framework.
strong-self today at 3:02 PM
found tree-sitter-fuse in the org, updated yesterday. is editor support next, like an lsp over the scala typechecker?
qsera today at 1:26 PM
I wish you took Haskell's syntax as such. Why did you mix rust and possibly other stuff with it?
faangguyindia today at 2:03 PM
i loved haskell but cross platform haskell deployment is still pain