The Goose Programming Language

I'm curious, for someone more familiar with Goose: how do you represent an arbitrary number of dynamically sized values? If you have a fixed number of stacks, it seems like only a fixed number of values can change size at any given time.

For instance, how would you represent a hash table where the values are strings and at random, the program inserts or deletes a random string?

This doesn't seem like something you could easily represent. The only way I can think of is to keep a stack that holds all of your strings, and you periodically compact it.

Edit: Maybe you could also have a separate stack for strings of various sizes. One each for strings less than 8, 16, ... bytes. But at that point you're basically implementing your own malloc by hand.

Edit: Fwiw I do think Goose is very cool! I've had to hand-roll a lot of similar stuff in Rust before to speed up memory management

This looks very interesting! I mostly write in garbage-collected languages (to the extent that I still write anything by hand...) so I'm just a spectator in memory management debates, but it's often struck me that heap management is more of an art than a science. The idea of treating memory more like stacks made immediate intuitive sense to me. I'm also fascinated by the thread implementation, although I'm not knowledgeable enough to to think through the potential benefits/costs vs other approaches to concurrency.

I wonder if the name of the language was inspired by the way geese fly in formation, with trailing birds saving energy by flying inside the aerodynamic shadow of the leaders, and swapping in and out as needed. If so, a very nice metaphor for the memory management model.

I was also impressed by the documentation. As we know AI-generted docs tends to be rather mediocre, but the author has clearly invested time in making in readable such that the relevance and rationale of design decisions provide the context that a curious programmer needs to understand why things are implemented in a particular way.

I really appreciated the detailed samples, ranging from simple algorithmic theorems up to a small game. Again, I don't have the experience to rate the language vs others, but I was struck by readable the code was and how easy it was to follow task flow. Not having to think about classes is always a plus!

Anyway, I usually the the offering of a new language with dispassionate interest, as something to be aware of and but not get too invested in or familiar with until it gains enough popularity to have a good shot at longevity. Goose is the first language in a long time where I looked at it and immediately thought that I'd like to use it for its own sake.

I made the language, AMA :)

Educate me: how to create a program in Goose which reads a JSON structure, prints it out and finishes. How is memory for JSON allocated on stack? It can be from 1K to 1M - depending on the file...

It would be really great to see how it fits in embedded systems, MCUs in particular!

Embassy (https://github.com/embassy-rs/embassy) uses this concept of no heap allocation and I find it really solid. Even if you write in C, most of the times you don't use heap. MISRA, the C coding standard for automotives, doesn't allow dynamic allocation!

Rust's appeal (to me) is safety, performance, DX in that order.

Where does Goose sit when classified along these dimensions?

Sure, performance is right there on the packaging but no word about UB in the README. I read "Goose has syntax familiar to C and Rust" as DX in the same ballpark, but is it a performance first or safety first language.

If it is the former it occupies the same crowded niche as C++ and its many cousins and will have a hard time.

If it's the latter it will have much more room to prosper. We don't have enough languages in the niche that Rust and Ada fill right now.

I'm curious, when returning a dynamically sized array from a function, does the whole array need to be copied? C++/Rust would simple move the array out of the function (i.e., they would only copy the pointer to the underlying data), but it seems this wouldn't work in Goose if the stack the dynamic array lives in is cleared on return?

Lobster is the author's other programming language, previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47239955

The right ideas. Not optimized for reallocation. Creates pressure to overload types, making secure software unattainable.

> One memory model: stacks, and scope exit is the free

What are the ergonomics of this I wonder.

Interesting, but can you write something like an LRU cache?

I love that the logo is a very fast goose

Do android dream of goose?

If you can't be bothered to read and structure your own README after getting an AI agent to write more than 10,000+ lines on a single page, it becomes a DONTREADME.md.

Yet, the author expects YOU to read all of what they didn't write. So I ain't reading all of that.

Keep going, and I hope more people start rolling their own languages.

If anyone is interested, I'm fairly close to finalizing Slang and I'm considering open-sourcing it in the near future. What originally started as a simple register based lang for an embeddable VM turned into an insanely expressive meta?programming language. Full system Fω, expansive whole program reflection (you can reflect on absolutely anything), string memory & logic safety..

You can do stuff like this:

   (fn answer () -> i64 0)
   (defpass build-answer
     (phase source)
     (transform (lambda (f)
       (fn-with f 'body '(let ((a (arr (42)))) (at a 0)))))
     (safety (lambda (goal) (syntax (refl)))))
   (run-pass build-answer answer)
   (fnmut answer
     (transform (lambda (f)
       (if (memory-safe? (check-memory (current-program)))
         f (syntax-error 'unproved-memory)))))
   (defpass inspect-ssa
     (phase ssa)
     (transform (lambda (f)
       (if (memory-safe? (check-memory (ssa-current-program)))
         f (syntax-error 'unproved-ssa-memory))))
     (proof (lambda (goal) (syntax (refl)))))
   (run-pass inspect-ssa answer)
   (answer)

   (fn next ((i i64)) -> i64 (+ i 1))
   (fncontract next
     (ensures result (successor (Eq i64 result (+ (old i) 1)) auto)))
   (fn read-second ((i i64)) -> i64
     (let ((a (arr (0 42)))) (at a i)))
   (fncontract read-second (requires (one (Eq i64 i 1))))
   (let ((i (next 0)))
     (with-proof ((one (Eq i64 i 1) (result-proof i successor)))
       (print (read-second i))))

   (var answer 0)
   (asm (input rdi 20)
        (input rsi 22)
        (output rax answer)
        (mov rdi rax)
        (add rsi rax))
   (print answer)

   (macroop \ (a) (asm (mov a rax)))
   (\ 42)

   (print (llvm add 20 22))
   (print (->i64 (llvm fused-multiply-add (f64) 6.0 7.0 0.0)))
   (llvm fn sum32 ((x i32) (y i32)) -> i32
     (block entry
       (value answer (llvm add x y (declare (flags nsw))))
       (llvm return answer)))
   (print (->i64 (sum32 (the i32 20) (the i32 22))))

I can't see a reason to use this and not C++ It reads like slop text

An AI-generated language with an AI-generated article proclaiming AI-generated benchmarks about how it's 3x faster than C++. Spare me.

Looks cool, and well developed. But really, cover pages need some better TL;DR, about the purpose. What is it for? There are a ton of languages out there. What gap is this filling? What is the purpose, the use case. Why do I need to keep reading further?

Edit Man, two posting about Goose back to back. Carmack alone might be enough to read further.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224100

[flagged]

Oh, is this then the Holy Grail of memory handling or what?!

Please share it with logistics guys, since putting stuff from here and there into warehouse storage, then taking away, put some more in than planned sometimes, keeps spinning their heads. They need all the good logic!

So, yet another programming language, that's nice. I never thought there will be one more beyond English.

  Evolution of programming languages:
  - 1940s → Machine Code ( 0s 1s )
  - 1949  → Assembly
  - 1957  → FORTRAN
  - 1959  → COBOL
  - 1964  → BASIC
  - 1970  → Pascal
  - 1972  → C
  - 1983  → C++
  - 1991  → Python
  - 1993  → Ruby
  - 1995  → Java
  - 1995  → JavaScript
  - 1995  → PHP
  - 2000  → C#
  - 2009  → Go
  - 2010  → Rust
  - 2011  → Kotlin
  - 2011  → Elixir
  - 2012  → TypeScript
  - 2014  → Swift
  - 2015  → Solidity
  - 2026  → English

PLEASE rewrite this without AI-isms. AI can write perfectly good code now, but its prose - even the latest models - is just awful to read. It hurts my brain to read this.