Squiggle

Squiggle (GitHub: wavebeem/squiggle, License: MIT, npm: squiggle-lang)

Squiggle is a strict, expression-oriented, compile-to-JS programming language. Yes, yet another compile-to-JS language. At the beginning I was sceptic about it, but once I started reading the tutorial posted on the site I adjusted my opinion. Not everything is there yet, but I need to say that I like the way it looks and might even consider picking it up.

So some of the features that drew my attention are:

• Arity checked functions
  • When calling a function created in Squiggle with not enough arguments, it throws an exception.

• Frozen literals
  • Array and object literals are frozen with Object.freeze by default, so you can’t accidentally mutate them.

• Easy updates
  • Operators ++ to concatenate two arrays or two strings, and ~ to merge two objects into a new frozen object with the prototype of the first object.

• Destructuring assignment
  • Grab object properties or array elements when you assign variables, like: let [x, y] = [1, 2] or let {x, y} = {x: 1, y: 2}.

• Pattern matching
  • Is similar to the Javascript switch but with destructuring power built-in and no dangerous fall-through.

• No type coercion
  • Standard operators like +, -, *, and more, have been replaced with strict version that do not perform any type coercions, throwing exceptions on bad inputs.

• Deep equality
  • The operator == performs a deep equality check.

There are a lot more features which just make it work a bit nicer. If you want a good overview of what this language can do I would recommend you reading the tutorial section of the website and then give it a shot in the browser.

Here is a small example provided by the developer in which you can see how it would work together met Node’s HTTP package.

let http = require "http"

let port = 1337
let host = "127.0.0.1"

def handler(res, res) =
    let headers = {"Content-Type": "text/plain"}
    let _ = res.writeHead(200, headers)
    let _ = res.end("Hello world\n")
    in undefined

let server = http.createServer(handler)
let _ = server.listen(port, host)
let _ = console.log("Server running at http://" ++ host + ":" ++ port ++ "/")
in undefined

Since there is a comment section present after the latest update, I would love to here what you guys think of this and the blog in general.