alt Hacker NewsHi, I'm the author.
HN staff: someone posted before me. Could we change the title to "Bend - a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs"?
Everyone: feel free to ask any question, but I'd be highly appreciative if you could be a bit civilized and respectful this time. I've worked on this for 1 year, nearly 16h/day, 7 days a week, and I'm giving it for free. You need not to use it. So, I'd be thankful if you could point occasional failures politely rather than throwing me in a lava pit.
Thank you!
Replies
Amazing work, one question regarding the guide, it states:
> That same file is the CPU program and the GPU kernel: clang builds it for the host, Metal or CUDA builds it for the device, so a `!` runs the exact same code on either chip.
What exactly is this saying? The guide doesn't really explicitly define `!`, and it's unclear from this sentence whether it's saying that, "clang builds it for the host and Metal, and CUDA builds it for the device", or if it's saying, "clang builds it for the host, Metal, and CUDA, and builds it for the device", or something else entirely.
Hey Victor! Been following you since HVM/Kind, partly because I'm moderately unhappy with the state of out of the box automatic parallelism in modern languages!
Do you plan to invest in profile guided optimization or autotuning in Bend2 - using runtime profiles / cost models to make decisions around SIMD vs. multicore vs. GPU parallelization?
Bend2's model might give you a really nice view into available parallelization. Heck I can imagine integrating an LLM to profile and optimize in an absurdly expensive `-O7` optimization mode one day!
I like the idea of a language intended from the start to be proved and it seems very compelling given coding agents. It's a good idea that others don't see coming -- so expect it to be frequently misunderstood and even verbally abused!
Hi author :wave:
I'm confused - could you explain how the board/flag animation relates to Bend's compile time checking? Is it actually a direct demonstration of Bend running a check?
Could you recommed literature (preferrably a single book) that does not require prior knowledge and allows to fully understand the logical foundation of it?
(Why it is done the way it is, what problems are solved by affinity, why closure can be called at most once, how a function that never returns can prove anything, and everything else)
Just wanted to say this is really, really cool, and impressive stuff. Looking forward to reading your papers and playing with it. Thanks for working hard on it and sharing it with us.
Thank you for adding a 5-line AGENTS.md. Other projects force you to install skills or MCP even when they're just doing the same thing.
Congrats, Victor!
É ótimo ver um brasileiro criando algo tão único!
honestly just Bend is a great HN title, you can describe it more concretely on the homepage
Speaking of lava, you should do a presentation to the local tech group if you're ever here in Bend, Oregon...
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Don't know whether this is a common outcome, but I tried the "remove the walls" example, and the result was... scary. It completely changed the game so that movement is now diagonal, and made the arbitrary decision that up/down move you on the positive diagonal, and left/right move you on the negative diagonal.
The problem, of course, is that having only the one single "you can't win" law is severely underspecified, but the solution was too clever by half, and highlights the problem with this approach — every program will be under-specified, because, at some point, writing the laws becomes a bigger problem than writing the code itself.
This becomes a real issue because the combination of underspecified but rigid laws pushes the aI towards this sort of "creative" solution that matches the letter but not spirit of the law. In this case, the issue was obvious, but I seriously worry about what sort of shenanigans will occur in less obvious cases.