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Comments (132)

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  Aardappel
  Btw I made the language, AMA. repo: https://github.com/aardappel/goose
• malkia
  "Threads that share nothing. A worker is compiled as a separate program with its own memory, and flat values cross typed queues as a memcpy. Data races, locks, atomics and memory orderings do not exist in the language."That reminds me of Dart Isolates - https://dart.dev/language/isolates
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  malisper
  I'm curious, for someone more familiar with Goose: how do you represent an arbitrary number of dynamically sized values? If you have a fixed number of stacks, it seems like only a fixed number of values can change size at any given time.For instance, how would you represent a hash table where the values are strings and at random, the program inserts or deletes a random string?This doesn't seem like something you could easily represent. The only way I can think of is to keep a stack that holds all of your strings, and you periodically compact it.Edit: Maybe you could also have a separate stack for strings of various sizes. One each for strings less than 8, 16, ... bytes. But at that point you're basically implementing your own malloc by hand.Edit: Fwiw I do think Goose is very cool! I've had to hand-roll a lot of similar stuff in Rust before to speed up memory management
• bobbydigitales
  "That looks really neat! The automatic analysis and use of multiple data stacks and resizable fields takes it from "lots of work can be done this way" to "basically everything can be".The relative references and built in binary structure validation also enable direct memory mapping of data structures and immediate use of network data. "Parsing" file and network data is often 100x slower than it needs to be." - John Carmack
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  pradn
  Goose is pretty cool. The idea is that you don’t need to make representable all programs: a language for a restricted purpose is ok. As long as you can statically specify the number of growable memory regions, you can use Goose. However, since there’s no garbage collection, you’ll probably need to be careful about memory use while a program is running. Ie: the stacks can get too big if you keep growing them, even as old data is not used any more.Still, for a large number of programs - like data-oriented applications - it’s probably a good fit. It might work ok with entity-component game systems as long as you reuse old memory…
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  ebiederm
  I seem to remember the ML guys went down this route. I believe they called it regions.From what little I read in the literature I seem to recall that there were enough programs with quite a bit more memory usage that they decided this approach was a dead end.Does anyone know anymore details?
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  anigbrowl
  This looks very interesting! I mostly write in garbage-collected languages (to the extent that I still write anything by hand...) so I'm just a spectator in memory management debates, but it's often struck me that heap management is more of an art than a science. The idea of treating memory more like stacks made immediate intuitive sense to me. I'm also fascinated by the thread implementation, although I'm not knowledgeable enough to to think through the potential benefits/costs vs other approaches to concurrency.I wonder if the name of the language was inspired by the way geese fly in formation, with trailing birds saving energy by flying inside the aerodynamic shadow of the leaders, and swapping in and out as needed. If so, a very nice metaphor for the memory management model.I was also impressed by the documentation. As we know AI-generted docs tends to be rather mediocre, but the author has clearly invested time in making in readable such that the relevance and rationale of design decisions provide the context that a curious programmer needs to understand why things are implemented in a particular way.I really appreciated the detailed samples, ranging from simple algorithmic theorems up to a small game. Again, I don't have the experience to rate the language vs others, but I was struck by readable the code was and how easy it was to follow task flow. Not having to think about classes is always a plus!Anyway, I usually the the offering of a new language with dispassionate interest, as something to be aware of and but not get too invested in or familiar with until it gains enough popularity to have a good shot at longevity. Goose is the first language in a long time where I looked at it and immediately thought that I'd like to use it for its own sake.
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  Aardappel
  I made the language, AMA :)
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  pulse7
  Educate me: how to create a program in Goose which reads a JSON structure, prints it out and finishes. How is memory for JSON allocated on stack? It can be from 1K to 1M - depending on the file...
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  wewewedxfgdf
  What are the down sides? That's the key question when a better thing comes along.
• AnEro
  Such a cool idea! I've been toying around making a few libraries to force languages to do that direct io zero-read mapping to data structures. Ofcourse this looks way better and infinity less hacky, but it is a fun and trippy experience to find someone working in the same direction as you independently.
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  weinzierl
  Rust's appeal (to me) is safety, performance, DX in that order.Where does Goose sit when classified along these dimensions?Sure, performance is right there on the packaging but no word about UB in the README. I read "Goose has syntax familiar to C and Rust" as DX in the same ballpark, but is it a performance first or safety first language.If it is the former it occupies the same crowded niche as C++ and its many cousins and will have a hard time.If it's the latter it will have much more room to prosper. We don't have enough languages in the niche that Rust and Ada fill right now.
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  kadw
  It would be really great to see how it fits in embedded systems, MCUs in particular!Embassy (https://github.com/embassy-rs/embassy) uses this concept of no heap allocation and I find it really solid. Even if you write in C, most of the times you don't use heap. MISRA, the C coding standard for automotives, doesn't allow dynamic allocation!
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  daoxid
  I'm curious, when returning a dynamically sized array from a function, does the whole array need to be copied? C++/Rust would simple move the array out of the function (i.e., they would only copy the pointer to the underlying data), but it seems this wouldn't work in Goose if the stack the dynamic array lives in is cleared on return?
• anon
  undefined
• anon
  undefined
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  andsoitis
  Lobster is the author's other programming language, previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47239955
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  pron
  Interesting, but can you write something like an LRU cache?
• FrankWilhoit
  The right ideas. Not optimized for reallocation. Creates pressure to overload types, making secure software unattainable.
• timcobb
  > One memory model: stacks, and scope exit is the freeWhat are the ergonomics of this I wonder.
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  calvinmorrison
  Can someone explain the weird phrasing here "Nothing moves, so references survive growth" that AI does.
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  groundzeros2015
  He didn’t comment on goose. He talked about a concept and the goose guy said “that’s like my idea”. And John said “yeah sounds like it”.
• skrebbel
  I love that the logo is a very fast goose
• gigatexal
  Would be interesting to see Luke’s Zed language from the replies on HN.
• rvz
  If you can't be bothered to read and structure your own README after getting an AI agent to write more than 10,000+ lines on a single page, it becomes a DONTREADME.md.Yet, the author expects YOU to read all of what they didn't write. So I ain't reading all of that.
• baalimago
  Do android dream of goose?
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  rfgplk
  Keep going, and I hope more people start rolling their own languages.If anyone is interested, I'm fairly close to finalizing Slang and I'm considering open-sourcing it in the near future. What originally started as a simple register based lang for an embeddable VM turned into an insanely expressive meta?programming language. Full system Fω, expansive whole program reflection (you can reflect on absolutely anything), string memory & logic safety..You can do stuff like this: (fn answer () -> i64 0) (defpass build-answer (phase source) (transform (lambda (f) (fn-with f 'body '(let ((a (arr (42)))) (at a 0))))) (safety (lambda (goal) (syntax (refl))))) (run-pass build-answer answer) (fnmut answer (transform (lambda (f) (if (memory-safe? (check-memory (current-program))) f (syntax-error 'unproved-memory))))) (defpass inspect-ssa (phase ssa) (transform (lambda (f) (if (memory-safe? (check-memory (ssa-current-program))) f (syntax-error 'unproved-ssa-memory)))) (proof (lambda (goal) (syntax (refl))))) (run-pass inspect-ssa answer) (answer) or this: (fn next ((i i64)) -> i64 (+ i 1)) (fncontract next (ensures result (successor (Eq i64 result (+ (old i) 1)) auto))) (fn read-second ((i i64)) -> i64 (let ((a (arr (0 42)))) (at a i))) (fncontract read-second (requires (one (Eq i64 i 1)))) (let ((i (next 0))) (with-proof ((one (Eq i64 i 1) (result-proof i successor))) (print (read-second i)))) it also supports full inline asm or llvm ir: (var answer 0) (asm (input rdi 20) (input rsi 22) (output rax answer) (mov rdi rax) (add rsi rax)) (print answer) (macroop \ (a) (asm (mov a rax))) (\ 42) (print (llvm add 20 22)) (print (->i64 (llvm fused-multiply-add (f64) 6.0 7.0 0.0))) (llvm fn sum32 ((x i32) (y i32)) -> i32 (block entry (value answer (llvm add x y (declare (flags nsw)))) (llvm return answer))) (print (->i64 (sum32 (the i32 20) (the i32 22)))) Even though you can write this by hand, the core idea is to get a very dense and terse language that LLMs can emit while guaranteeing safety and performance.
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  IshKebab
  PLEASE rewrite this without AI-isms. AI can write perfectly good code now, but its prose - even the latest models - is just awful to read. It hurts my brain to read this.
• anon
  undefined
• anon
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  FrustratedMonky
  Looks cool, and well developed. But really, cover pages need some better TL;DR, about the purpose. What is it for? There are a ton of languages out there. What gap is this filling? What is the purpose, the use case. Why do I need to keep reading further?Edit Man, two posting about Goose back to back. Carmack alone might be enough to read further.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224100
• ethanhood_okroh
  [flagged]
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  mi_lk
  Obviously the guy is replying to something that you can't see without logging in twitter. And without context this means little
• anonymous908213
  [flagged]
• mihaaly
  Oh, is this then the Holy Grail of memory handling or what?!Please share it with logistics guys, since putting stuff from here and there into warehouse storage, then taking away, put some more in than planned sometimes, keeps spinning their heads. They need all the good logic!So, yet another programming language, that's nice. I never thought there will be one more beyond English. Evolution of programming languages: - 1940s → Machine Code ( 0s 1s ) - 1949 → Assembly - 1957 → FORTRAN - 1959 → COBOL - 1964 → BASIC - 1970 → Pascal - 1972 → C - 1983 → C++ - 1991 → Python - 1993 → Ruby - 1995 → Java - 1995 → JavaScript - 1995 → PHP - 2000 → C# - 2009 → Go - 2010 → Rust - 2011 → Kotlin - 2011 → Elixir - 2012 → TypeScript - 2014 → Swift - 2015 → Solidity - 2026 → English
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  iacuobos
  I can't see a reason to use this and not C++ It reads like slop text
• geoffbp
  No relation to https://goose-docs.ai/ I guess?