alt Hacker NewsGood questions! The short answer to the first is that the language is interpreted, not compiled, so optimizations are moot.
Aliases are strongly-typed which helps avoid some issues. Memory mods come with the territory —- if ‘a’ and ‘b’ point to the same array and ‘a’ resizes that array, then the array behind ‘b’ gets resized too. The one tricky situation is when ‘a’ and ‘b’ each reference range of elements, not the whole array, because a resize of ‘a’ would force a resize of the width of ‘b’. Resizing in this case is usually not allowed.
Garbage collection is indeed done (poorly) by reference counting, and also (very well) by a tracing function that Cicada’s command line script runs after every command.
You’re exactly right, the library is lean because I figure it’s easy to add a C function interface for any capability you want. There’s a bit of personal bias as to what I did include - for example all the basic calculator functions are in, right down to atan(), but no regex. Basic IO (save, load, input, print) is included.
Type marshaling — the Cicada int/float types are defined by cicada.h and can be changed! You just have to use the same types in your C code.
When you run Cicada you pass a list of C functions paired with their Cicada names: { “myCfunction”, &myCfunction }. Then, in Cicada, $myCfunction() runs the callback.
Thanks for the questions! This is exactly the sort of feedback that helps me learn more about the landscape..
Thanks for the detailed response. The interpreted approach makes sense for the use case - when you're embedding a scripting layer, you usually want simplicity and portability over raw speed anyway.
The aliasing semantics you describe (resizes propagating through aliases) is an interesting choice. It's closer to how references work in languages like Python than to the "borrow checker" approach Rust takes. Probably more intuitive for users coming from dynamic languages, even if it means some operations need runtime checks.
The hybrid GC approach (reference counting + periodic tracing) is pragmatic. Reference counting handles the common case cheaply, and the tracing pass catches cycles. That's similar to how CPython handles it.
The C registration API sounds clean - explicit pairing of names to function pointers is about as simple as it gets. Do you handle varargs on the Cicada side, or does each registered function have a fixed arity that the interpreter enforces?