Ante’s goal was always to be a slightly higher level language than Rust. I always imagined Ante to fill this gap in language design between higher-level garbage collected languages like Java, Python, and Haskell, and lower level non-garbage collected languages like C, C++, and Rust. I still think there’s room there for a language which tries to manage things by default but also allows users to manually do so if needed as an optimization.
Introduction Algebraic Effects are a useful abstraction for reasoning about effectful programs by letting us leave the interpretation of these effects to callers. However, most existing literature discusses these in the context of a pure functional language with pervasive sharing of values. What restrictions would we need to introduce algebraic effects into a language with ownership and borrowing - particularly Ante?1 Ownership Consider the following program: effect Read a with read : Unit -> a the_value (value: a) (f: Unit -> b can Read a) : b = handle f () | read () -> resume value This seems like it’d pass type checking at first glance, but we can easily construct a program that tries to use the same moved value twice:
This is part of Ante’s goal to loosen restrictions on low-level programming while remaining fast, memory-safe, and thread-safe. Background When writing low-level, memory-safe, and thread-safe programs, a nice feature that lets us achieve all of these is an ownership model. Ownership models have been used by quite a few languages, but the language which popularized them was Rust. In Rust, the compiler will check our code to ensure we have no dangling references and cannot access already-freed memory (among other errors).
Template by Bootstrapious. Ported to Hugo by DevCows.
