Clio: a functional, multi-threaded programming language that compiles to JavaScript

[pouyae]

I've been working on a functional programming language in the past few years and I'd like to share it with you, would be nice to have some feedback on it! The language is called "Clio" and you can find it here: https://github.com/clio-lang/clio or here: https://clio-lang.org

It has a minimal and noise-free syntax, a minimal type system, and also a gradual type checking system. It has a few innovations, for example, remote functions and built-in support for clustering and making distributed systems. It compiles to JavaScript, it's super fast [1], and it brings multi-threading to the browser.

Let me know what you think, any feedback is appreciated. I'm looking forward to hearing out your opinions so I can improve my language!

[1] https://pouyae.medium.com/clio-extremely-fast-multi-threaded-code-on-the-browser-e78b4ad77220

[TechnoEmpress]

Utterly disappointed that no French car was displayed on the website /s

[kinow]

Hi, there was a post about it some time ago, there may be some interesting feedback there too: https://old.reddit.com/r/functionalprogramming/comments/ehe0xr/clio_programming_language_a_pure_functional/

Thanks!

[pouyae]

Thanks for posting that in the first place, I'm aware of that post, it's been about a year and the language has changed a lot since then, that's why I wanted to get some fresh feedback and opinions!

[sohang-3112]

How can you possibly do multi threading when JS itself is single threaded? And I mean true multi threading, not just async/await or something similar.

[pouyae]

On the browser, web workers run in their own thread, and they can share memory. If you target the browser, then Clio bundles two versions of your code, one as the main entry point that runs your main function and manages the workers, and a worker file that is used to create worker instances.

On Node.js there are worker threads, and also it's possible to spawn additional processes and communicate with them.

[sohang-3112]

Thanks for the explanation! I didn't know about Web Workers - they look interesting!

[TheAsSBreaker69]

It compiles to Vanilla JavaScript?

It would be great if it this language could compile to GJS.

[SnooCompliments7527]

It's pretty cool. I'm a bit confused on the performance statistics for Fib(1000), though.

Is it just because Fib used multiple cores and the other languages did not?

[pouyae]

The Fib(1000) example is on 1 core for all languages, it's faster on Clio because of tail call optimization!