It seems similar in concept to Haxe, but focused on writing libraries which are then called from the target language, rather than building your whole application in Fusion. Is that correct?
How are exceptions translated to languages which don't have exceptions, like C?
The amount of targets seems impressive, but I don't see anything resembling a standard library. Usually, it's in the standard library where diverging behavior between targets shows up. Haxe's documentation tends to cover those issues, and lets you know when a behavior is target-dependent, or unspecified. They do try to be consistent between targets whenever possible in a performant way.
Loreline[0] is a recent project which leverages Haxe to build a cross-platform library. Is there a similar project showcasing how Fusion can be used for that?
It's a nice idea but the C portion expects an array of unknown size, no bounds checking possible at all and it's also not returned how large the PNM image is. I also don't understand why glib is needed here to get the array to work. It's also missing the stdint.h include to be able to use uint8_t.
> I've read about Haxe in 2000s, before I started my work on Fusion. They have different design goals: in Haxe you create whole apps, in Fusion you create components to be used from other languages. Haxe has syntax similar to the (now dead) ActionScript, Fusion is similar to C#. Fusion transpiles to C, D, Swift, TypeScript, OpenCL and Haxe does not.
At a time I was very interested in haxe, but their focus on games made it (perceived as) lacking in the area I wanted to use it (cross platform client-server apps). Recently rust seems to have taken this role for me.
Nice stuff, I'm working on something like Kaitai Struct, and it'll be very convenient to codegen to Fusion, to support multiple target languages.
However, what I like the least in all kind of software is underdocumentation. There's some reference, it's not bad, but actually it's just bunch of examples. If I want to find out exactly how a particular type or statement translates into a specific language, I'll have to dig into the code.
> implementing reusable components (libraries) for C, C++, C#, D, Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift, TypeScript and OpenCL C, all from single codebase
Why is this needed? I can't imagine that. I am sure writing code in fusion will produce C++ and Python code which is suboptimal and doesn't fit well in these languages.
ORMs and variations like Protobuf or things that have to be cross-plateform in the wide sense. The perspective that the same source will behave the same in various environments, and "velocity" trumps performance considerations. If you want to work on things where performance matters, consider embedded/firmware programming ;-)
I think the target application is writing the same algorithm in multiple places with a guarantee that the logic will be based on a single source of truth. Not unlike Protocol Buffers work to standardize data layout across platforms.
It still feels overcomplicated compared to the standard solution of writing a library in a compiled language you like, exposing a C ABI compatible interface, and hooking it up to any language that can work with that (i.e. any language).
> writing the same algorithm in multiple places with
This seems for me to be reasonable. Like for a video game with server written in Go/C++/Rust and client written in C#/Javascript, where the same calculations should be done on both sides.
I personally am thinking that developing more programming languages has stopped making sense a long time ago because all of them ignore this untapped market that would help more languages.
C based FFI uniquely privileges C the same way the dollar being a global reserve currency privileges the US, but in the case of currencies the differences in how they work are very small, but with programming languages the differences are substantial.
Half the people working on new programming languages should have been working on GObject competitors instead.
One of the things that is difficult to grasp is that the best FFI is not native to a specific programming language, meaning it does not privilege any specific programming language. Of course this doesn't mean that it cannot be heavily inspired by a particular programming language, it just means that the implementation must be common to all programming languages.
What I mean by the latter is that the features need to be implementable in all programming languages and the easiest way to do it is to define common data types.
The big fallacy that the C FFI advocates present is that it is somehow fine to require full C compiler infrastructure and the C standard library to parse C headers and produce the ABI, but somehow it is the height of evil to define a fat pointer as a C struct consisting of a data pointer and a function pointer and mandating every language to use it, because it is not a C native datatype and only the mythical programming language C is allowed to be used for FFI. I'm pretty sure half the battle could have been won by C having defined common datatypes for the sole purpose of ffi in its standard library.
You don't need a C ABI here because the language could in theory generate both the library and the cross language bindings, the underlying mechanism then becomes a mere implementation detail.
I feel like there is a huge missed opportunity that Fusion Lang overlooked.
As others say ; how does debugging work? I was a user of Haxe and Monkey and both had/have serious debugging issues; I think this can only work if it has an interpreter for itself (self hosted I guess ideally) with a proper debugger.
I like it. I just wonder if today transpiling is better then Agentic Programming. Any specific use case where i should use it? With a good model, SKILLS.md, AGENTS.md and prompts I am able to do - allegedly - a better job then a transpiler, no?
Nice idea. I'm just wondering how to debug code written in fusion... probably you must focus on one of outputs, debug that one, and then back-fit the changes to the fusion source. :/
The point, AFAICT, is not in using all capabilities of all the target languages. Rather, it's about expressing some narrower class of computations and grafting them seamlessly into the target languages. Think of data formats, parsers, network protocols, stuff like handling and rendering of text, etc.
I suppose you can write various algorithms in it, and have that code natively trsnspiled to different languages, for ease of native interoperability. It's unlikely to produce the absolutely most optimized code, but the lack of the interface translation barrier (aka FFI) may more than compensate for it.
Rust is not easy to target efficiently, due to the borrow checker, and they likely don't want to dyn Box everything.
Fusion is a programming language designed for implementing reusable components (libraries) for C, C++, C#, D, Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift, TypeScript and OpenCL C, all from single codebase.
How are exceptions translated to languages which don't have exceptions, like C?
The amount of targets seems impressive, but I don't see anything resembling a standard library. Usually, it's in the standard library where diverging behavior between targets shows up. Haxe's documentation tends to cover those issues, and lets you know when a behavior is target-dependent, or unspecified. They do try to be consistent between targets whenever possible in a performant way.
Loreline[0] is a recent project which leverages Haxe to build a cross-platform library. Is there a similar project showcasing how Fusion can be used for that?
[0] - https://loreline.app/en/docs/
I wonder what performance and generated code size/quality look like.
> I've read about Haxe in 2000s, before I started my work on Fusion. They have different design goals: in Haxe you create whole apps, in Fusion you create components to be used from other languages. Haxe has syntax similar to the (now dead) ActionScript, Fusion is similar to C#. Fusion transpiles to C, D, Swift, TypeScript, OpenCL and Haxe does not.
However, what I like the least in all kind of software is underdocumentation. There's some reference, it's not bad, but actually it's just bunch of examples. If I want to find out exactly how a particular type or statement translates into a specific language, I'll have to dig into the code.
Why is this needed? I can't imagine that. I am sure writing code in fusion will produce C++ and Python code which is suboptimal and doesn't fit well in these languages.
It still feels overcomplicated compared to the standard solution of writing a library in a compiled language you like, exposing a C ABI compatible interface, and hooking it up to any language that can work with that (i.e. any language).
This seems for me to be reasonable. Like for a video game with server written in Go/C++/Rust and client written in C#/Javascript, where the same calculations should be done on both sides.
I don't know if fusion is the solution, but I know C isn't.
I personally am thinking that developing more programming languages has stopped making sense a long time ago because all of them ignore this untapped market that would help more languages.
C based FFI uniquely privileges C the same way the dollar being a global reserve currency privileges the US, but in the case of currencies the differences in how they work are very small, but with programming languages the differences are substantial.
Half the people working on new programming languages should have been working on GObject competitors instead.
One of the things that is difficult to grasp is that the best FFI is not native to a specific programming language, meaning it does not privilege any specific programming language. Of course this doesn't mean that it cannot be heavily inspired by a particular programming language, it just means that the implementation must be common to all programming languages.
What I mean by the latter is that the features need to be implementable in all programming languages and the easiest way to do it is to define common data types.
The big fallacy that the C FFI advocates present is that it is somehow fine to require full C compiler infrastructure and the C standard library to parse C headers and produce the ABI, but somehow it is the height of evil to define a fat pointer as a C struct consisting of a data pointer and a function pointer and mandating every language to use it, because it is not a C native datatype and only the mythical programming language C is allowed to be used for FFI. I'm pretty sure half the battle could have been won by C having defined common datatypes for the sole purpose of ffi in its standard library.
I feel like there is a huge missed opportunity that Fusion Lang overlooked.
Rust is not easy to target efficiently, due to the borrow checker, and they likely don't want to dyn Box everything.