Two months have passed since the announcement of Tolk. You might be wondered, what was going on and why there we no releases yet.
Throughout all November, I've been working on the vision of the future. My goal was to "visualize" what Tolk v1.0 should look like. What's the language we're all targeting to, so that it solves lots of practical problems, avoids manual cells/slices manipulation, provides sufficient mechanisms for ABI generation, but still being zero overhead. I have created a giant roadmap (40 PDF pages!) describing the vision, and how, step by step, we're going to reach it.
Throughout all December, I've been constantly working on the compiler's kernel. As you know, Tolk is a fork of FunC. FunC compiler internals are very challenging to be extended and modified. The way FunC looks like is just a mirror of its internal implementation. Heading towards the future, I had to partially "untangle" this "legacy FunC core", so that in the future, it will be able to "interbreed" with features it was not originally designed for.
Currently I am done with this preparation. Tolk v0.7 has just been released. It contains a fully rewritten semantic analysis kernel (though almost invisible to the end user, huh).
✅ Notable changes in Tolk v0.7:
1. Under the hood: refactor and revamp compiler internals. AST-level semantic analysis kernel
2. Under the hood: rewrite the type system from Hindley-Milner to static typing
3. Clear and readable error messages on type mismatch
4. Generic functions
fun f<T>(...) and instantiations like f<int>(...)5. The
bool type6. Type casting via
value as TPR on GitHub with detailed info. IDE plugins are updated accordingly.
BTW, a new version of blueprint was also released. You can now update compilers (Tolk / FunC / Tact) independently, they became peer dependencies.
P.S. I'll uncover the details about planned Tolk v1.0 quite soon.