Clay language

[bearophile]

Through Reddit I have found a link to some information about the Clay language, it wants to be (or it will be) a C++-class language, but it's not tied to C syntax. It shares several semantic similarities with D too. It looks like a cute language:
https://github.com/jckarter/clay/wiki/

Some small parts from the docs:

--------------------------

In Clay this:
https://github.com/jckarter/clay/wiki/Syntax-desugaring

static for (a in ...b)
    c;

is equivalent to:

{
    ref a = <first element of b>;
    c;
}
{
    ref a = <second element of b>;
    c;
}
/* ... */

I have an enhancement request about this for D:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4085

--------------------

The part about Safer pointer type system is very similar to what I did ask for D, and it looks similar to what Ada language does (for Clay this is just a proposal, not implemented yet, but Ada is a rock-solid language):
https://github.com/jckarter/clay/wiki/Safer-pointer-type-system

--------------------

This is something that I want for D too, it's important:

>Jonathan Shapiro (of BitC) makes an excellent argument that, in a systems language, it is often undesirable to depend on the whims of an ill-specified optimizer to convert abstract code into efficient machine code. The BitC specification thus includes the idea of guaranteed optimizations, to allow code to be written in a high-level style with predictably low or nonexistent runtime cost (link). [...] Because Clay seeks to support systems programming with high-level abstraction, certain patterns should be guaranteed to be optimized in a certain way, instead of being left to the whims of LLVM or a C compiler. Additional optimizations should not be prevented, however. [...] It should be possible to specify that one or more of these optimizations is required, and have the compiler raise an error when they cannot be applied for some reason.<

https://github.com/jckarter/clay/wiki/Guaranteed-optimizations

Bye,
bearophile