John Carmack on the Goose Language: multiple data stacks and relative references

Btw I made the language, AMA. repo: https://github.com/aardappel/goose

Goose is pretty cool. The idea is that you don’t need to make representable all programs: a language for a restricted purpose is ok. As long as you can statically specify the number of growable memory regions, you can use Goose. However, since there’s no garbage collection, you’ll probably need to be careful about memory use while a program is running. Ie: the stacks can get too big if you keep growing them, even as old data is not used any more.

Still, for a large number of programs - like data-oriented applications - it’s probably a good fit. It might work ok with entity-component game systems as long as you reuse old memory…

He didn’t comment on goose. He talked about a concept and the goose guy said “that’s like my idea”. And John said “yeah sounds like it”.

"That looks really neat! The automatic analysis and use of multiple data stacks and resizable fields takes it from "lots of work can be done this way" to "basically everything can be".

The relative references and built in binary structure validation also enable direct memory mapping of data structures and immediate use of network data. "Parsing" file and network data is often 100x slower than it needs to be." - John Carmack

I seem to remember the ML guys went down this route. I believe they called it regions.

From what little I read in the literature I seem to recall that there were enough programs with quite a bit more memory usage that they decided this approach was a dead end.

Does anyone know anymore details?

Such a cool idea! I've been toying around making a few libraries to force languages to do that direct io zero-read mapping to data structures. Ofcourse this looks way better and infinity less hacky, but it is a fun and trippy experience to find someone working in the same direction as you independently.

Would be interesting to see Luke’s Zed language from the replies on HN.

Obviously the guy is replying to something that you can't see without logging in twitter. And without context this means little

No relation to https://goose-docs.ai/ I guess?