Show HN: Solid, a scripting language with a tiny VM

  • Great job! I was looking for a small and simple embeddable language (smaller than Lua) for a long time. Solid looks very promising to me.

  • Are there any performance benchmarks?

    EDIT: The language looks pretty cool in general. I'm not a huge fan of the recursion syntax. In particular, the `this` keyword seems to just refer to the current function object, which is confusing since in other languages that usually refers to the object a method belongs to. Further, the choice of immutable lists as the default data structure is odd -- arrays would be much more performant (and are the usual choice for scripting languages anyway).

  • The core seems much more interesting than the Pawn language. I'd like to see more comparisons once this matures.

    A few points:

    1. I'd like to see the FFI implemented natively (i.e. by declaring in Solid and registering through C code/macro, instead of relying on object file parsing). Then it'll be extremely useful in a bare-metal microcontroller environment.

    2. Namespacing is needed -- I don't really want `parse_xxx` or `ast_node` in my global namespace!

  • Just wanted to say, kudos! I think it is essential for a language to have a good C interface otherwise it will be insulated. However some more example would be nice. Furthermore I think you mean "infix" in your documentation and not "inline".

  • Very cool. I would love to see immutable, persistent data collections as offered in Clojure.

  • Awesome work. How big is the executable?

    Also, what did you not like about the Lua object model?