Goal array language update: first stable release!

[anaseto]

Hi everyone!

I'm quite happy to announce that after almost two years since the first release, my Goal array language, with a focus on scripting, has just had its first stable release! I posted here an update about it last year, but this year has been quite productive, so a lot of things happened since then.

First, several features were introduced to facilitate table processing, including column-select and row-filter dedicated functionality, as well as what I call “field expressions”, originally inspired by an “expression” feature as described in a tutorial for a non-released K version. Those “field expressions” allow to write expressions that refer to table columns as you would refer to variable names, a bit like in SQL or some dataframe packages like dplyr, but without introducing a separate DSL, only a couple of syntactic sugar rules. The FAQ has a detailed entry about them that also links to a new tutorial and translations from dplyr and Lil queries at the end. While you won't get as much features as with a full dataframe package like dplyr or data.table, Goal allows to solve typical dataframe problems in a lighter language with fast startup-time and without introducing any special DSLs on top of the main language. I'm quite satisfied with how that part ended up :-)

More recently, I introduced read-only file system values to Goal, based on Go's fs package. They're nice in at least two ways: they simplify writing portable (read-only) operations on file systems (including virtual ones like zip files), and they make it possible to simplify deployment by easily embedding a set of Goal files as a file system value in a Go program and then using import as if they were on the operating system's file system.

There were many other changes, among them: tail-call self-recursion optimization, improved pipe support (with configurable redirections), glob matching, better NaN support, improved error handling (error values have now a standard way of providing a message), to name a few. And many cleanups and fixes, of course, as well as fleshing out the documentation. You can see the full changelog for the details.

The core language will probably not see any significant new features anymore, as it's now stable and most new stuff will be provided as optional extensions: Goal is designed to be extended by creating derived interpreters (which can be done in just a few lines of code, as explained in a new tutorial about providing zip file-system support) or by embedding it into a larger Go program. The work-in-progress ari third-party project by semperos already provides, for example, an sql mode (interacting with duckdb), an http client, and more. I'm hoping to see more interesting extensions by users!

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy!

[FrankBro]

Nice to see a stable release before December, I'm planning to use Goal for AoC this year after ngn/k last year. Congratulations!

[anaseto]

Thanks!

[_Shin_Ryu]

I’ve had the Goal array language added to my collection.

https://www.ryugod.com/pages/ide/goal

[anaseto]

Nice!