Ideas

[mikehearn]

Great project! It sounds like something similar to the ManagedC language by the truffle developers.

Here are some ideas:

• Convert the codebase to Kotlin, IntelliJ can automatically rewrite Java->Kotlin with a reasonably good quality, and things like smart casting and destructuring would reduce the verbosity a lot. It'd also be a nice example of a truffle language not implemented in Java.
• Rather than just not supporting delete at all, consider simply ignoring it. There's no reason to reject it.
• I don't know if the Eclipse C++ parser is going to work well longer term ... probably an easy way to start but it seems making a C++ parser these days is so hard that everyone just uses clang instead.
• Why no exceptions? That's not a truffle limitation surely?
• I'd suggest prioritising Java interop as a potential killer feature, beyond the memory safety. Cover is its own language, but I didn't see any discussion of what features it might add, vs take away.

[gckrol]

Hi Mike, thanks for your ideas.

1. I'm quite experienced with Java, and I actually like the syntax. I don't think it's wise to combine this project with learning Kotlin.
2. It was always my plan to simply ignore delete statements from a memory management perspective. A lot of C++ code depends on the destructor being actually invoked when the object goes out of scope (or is deleted) though, so I'll have to figure out something about this.
3. I don't know either, but if writing a parser is that hard I'm not going to attempt it. I may have to customize it a bit if I want to add non C/C++ syntax to Cover (like nested functions).
4. I don't like to use exceptions in C++, but with Cover being garbage collected I guess it could work. It doesn't have a high priority for me though.
5. I want to be able to call Cover functions from Java, not the other way around. Good interop would be a great feature to have obviously.