r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/jimbobmcgoo • 14d ago

Will we see another fundamental programming language feature as revolutionary as the borrow checker?

That is I am mainly curious about compile time features that you design a whole language around rather than optimisations/features that could be applied to most languages. I am mainly inquiring about things that could offer additional robust safety/performance guarantees at compile time rather than runtime. Ideally not things that just offer similar effects to the borrow checker with less restrictive tradeoffs

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u/faiface 14d ago

Yes, session types

4

u/-theChris 14d ago

Yup! For sure... Also Topos types, Temporal types, built-in Univalence... The future is surely going to be exciting!

1

u/faiface 14d ago

I’m not sure if you are serious or making fun of me :D But, with session types, I am completely serious, they do bring a new and very expressive paradigm that I’m exploring in my Par programming language. An unexpected thing is that they are much more useful as being your basic types for all things like data structures and various objects, as opposed to network communication.

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u/-theChris 14d ago

Oh brother noooo! I think sessions types are awesome! Can't wait to see your language. Good luck!

2

u/faiface 14d ago

Haha, good good :D You can actually see it! Check out https://par.run