The Slate Programming Language

Progress Report

briantrice — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 03:42:36 +0000

We’ve been in lurk mode for the last few months, but progress continues. Here are some highlights:

The VM was ported from C to C++, allowing some smarter handling by the VM of Slate pointers, which means that our GC is now precise instead of just conservative.
Syntactic support for *rest parameter passing in message sends was added, by sequestering the comma (“,”) as special syntax which goes after optional keywords and the main message phrase. Now, collections can be instantiated via, say, “Set new*, 1, 2, 3, 3“, for example. The ”,” selector for creating Points is now named “<>” to avoid collision.
Various inefficiency fixes which each resulted in a 10-15% speed gain were implemented. The VM is now substantially faster than a few months ago.
A simple inliner (not a JIT) which uses simple type inference to inline bytecode methods to produce inlined versions of the original method has been implemented. It is not yet robust enough to handle optional-argument passing, but is otherwise stable and useful.
Further updates are in development: a module system inspired by some recent work in Javascript, better support for concurrency, and trying to adapt interesting parts of the recent “Xtreams“ Smalltalk stream protocol for better inherent stream performance.

Cookbook examples posted to Rosetta Code

briantrice — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:01:46 +0000

The Rosetta Code project makes a wiki for collecting and organizing examples of interesting code snippets and programs across many programming languages. Since Slate lacks a good programming cookbook, we decided to translate many of its examples in order to illustrate Slate capabilities and idioms. You can find most of them on the Slate category page; we’ve managed to reach 32% completion in just a few days’ time. There are also many tasks which still could be done as an exercise.

It was also valuable to compare idioms and functions from other languages on an individual basis, and some have already been ported or adapted to Slate in the process.

Hello world!

admin — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:52:55 +0000

Welcome to the new website for the Slate programming language! We’ll be posting news updates here and discussing related issues.

Project Re-activated

briantrice — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:16:55 +0000

Thanks to Timmy Douglas’ efforts over the last couple of years, Slate is now running much faster and is easier to work with, so we’re relaunching the project at a new domain, slatelanguage.org. We now use Google to host our mailing list and sources.

Strongtalk available

briantrice — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 19:15:47 +0000

The Strongtalk VM is open-sourced, though still very Windows-specific. We are keeping tabs on the project to hopefully make use of the technology indirectly (via incorporation into Slate VM) or directly (via porting Slate to their VM).

Release 0.3.5

briantrice — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 19:17:50 +0000

Release 0.3.5 is now in the downloads area. This release’s focus has been on new features, fixes, and cleanups, including single-process event-loop concurrency with promises, a platform information/control plugin, online help for the REPL and Debugger, use of an extended define: form to replace the addPrototype:/addSlot: hassles, additional higher-order collection and stream manipulation facilities, slot-observer pattern support, and support for logical directory locations such as the home or current directory, resolved dynamically on use.

Release 0.3.4

briantrice — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:21:51 +0000

Release 0.3.4 is now in the downloads area. This release’s focus has been on new features, fixes, and cleanups, including some online help, improved portability and platform support, more powerful debugging, smarter allocation of delegation slots and code blocks, optimized argument-currying support, and protocol querying. Many new methods were added to numerics, strings, sequences, and streams. There is also now an extensible AutoLoader feature which transparently loads common features as they are first used.

Release 0.3.3

briantrice — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 19:22:35 +0000

Release 0.3.3 is now in the downloads area. This release’s focus has been on new features including improved cascading and macro semantics, support for startup and shutdown actions, persistent external connections over re-starts (for files, sockets, linked libraries), REPL control and history, SDL input handling and general improvements, structured file directory access, and support for additional datatypes and safety features.

Source Management Update

briantrice — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 19:23:38 +0000

Slate source management has been migrated from CVS to the DARCS system. See the downloads page for details on how to work with it.

Release 0.3.2

briantrice — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 19:24:11 +0000

Release 0.3.2 is now in the downloads area. This release’s focus has been on new features including improved dynamic C library access, smart console-based editing, UTF-16 encoding, socket access, and greater support for functional-style programming. There is also now greater control over inheritance issues, beyond basic multiple inheritance graph control.