alt Hacker NewsThis reads very vibecoded, but putting that aside...
1. How does this benefit from GPU parallelism? I don't know much about implementing proof assistant, as I am just a user, but its my understanding that these tasks aren't amenable to running on a GPU.
2. The comparison to Lean/Agda/Isabelle/etc have no meaning without understanding what programs are being used for comparison. I also so far have no reason to believe large-scale verified programs would ever adapt to Bend. For instance, I have a large software verification project written in Cubical Agda https://github.com/um-catlab/cubical-categorical-logic it's not clear to me how one would even begin to port this over to Bend, especially given the dependence on cubical
3. Single commit history is hella sus
4. Bend uses "an affine dependent type theory". Substructural dependent type systems are an active area of research. If this weren't slop, I'd expect such a system to be worthy of publication at a top programming languages conference. It sounds quite unlikely that a random vibecoded project with a Fable-written paper has worked out all of the kinks
5. I would've at least expected this paper to be cited https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15258 but it is noticeably absent
I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding, and I like that you're interested in this area of research/engineering, but you are wildly overstating what you have here and sound sus af
Replies
Funny seeing you here--I'm in 590 with Max and Eric. I saw Agda and guessed it was someone from the group :)
Commit history is back!
Victor Taelin has been doing interesting PLT research for 10+ years.
I suggest you read his history: https://gist.github.com/VictorTaelin/77fd5a2a8a4a07e1da6157e...
before making slop accusations. Older variant of what became Bend is 5 years old, so definitely not "vibe coded": https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM1
You expect an arxiv only paper to be cited? Do you even know fuck all about scientific research? Do you think someone can slap "Foundations of" in an arxiv title and we are mandated to cite it?
Yes, there's a lot of vibe-coding in many places, but the critical parts (compiler, runtime, kernel) are human designed, and the kernel has been extensively audited by human. All of it is my own design and architecture, and I'm a human, I think. We'll prune AI slop over time. The project is big, and we're a small team.
1. The paper explains it well (sadly it is written by Claude for now, but it is accurate):
https://github.com/bendlang/bend/blob/main/paper/BendRT.pdf
In short, we implemented a complete allocator, garbage-collector, closure evaluator and functional evaluator, on the GPU (with zero interaction net overhead this time). We then use a very simple (for now) scheduler that spreads binary recursive calls as to saturate all CPU or GPU cores, depending on where it is running. This is the simplest thing that works fast. In the future, we want to have a more flexible task stealing queue, but contention destroys GPU performance, so, that's the best thing that works, for now.
2. Benchmarks aside, large scale verified programs would run much faster on Bend for a simple reason: Bend is fully explicit. It has no tactics, and it does zero compile-time search. As always: the less a computer does, the faster it runs. This is a tradeoff. In exchange, Bend code is substantially more verbose than Lean, and it is more laborious to write Bend proofs. I argue this is the right tradeoff, because AI write proofs, and AI time is cheap, while bugs take human time, which is expensive.
3. Sorry I'm not proud of the commit history
4. I don't think it is worthy publication because the core idea is simple. We just use QTT-like linear types to fully prohibit runtime closures. So, paradoxes like Russel's and Girard's are blocked. In exchange, functions like List.map are not expressive (without templates). So it is not a research breakthrough. I just made a conscious trade here, which makes Bend way closer to C or Rust, than to Haskell or Lean.
5. Will patch.
Great questions actually, and surprisingly respectful. I appreciate it a lot.