Pentlander Blog

Why build Sasquach lang

I'm writing a new functional programming language called Sasquach that targets the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This post aims to answer why I'm building it, why I'm not just using another language, the goals and non-goals of the language, and why it's targeting the JVM.

Why

For the most part I'm building this language for myself. I've had a few side projects over the years, usually related to distributed systems or developer tools. The problem is that these pieces of software are most useful for teams of developers and are usually on the critical path. I'm a strong believer in dogfooding. The lack of a large scale system to test with or a team of developers to get feedback from drains my motivation to work on these projects. The fact that these systems are often business critical makes it difficult to do as a solo side project while maintaining a full time job.

I wanted to work on something that is both technically challenging and that I could actually use myself. I've been interested in programming language design for a while now, there was a 3 month period where I would read a post from Oleg Kiselyov's site at least once a day. I avoided actually writing a language because I was intimidated by the amount of upfront work required. After setting aside my latest project for the reasons mentioned above, I finally said fuck it and just started writing a language. I owe a big thank you to Jakub Dziworski, whose series on building a JVM language was a huge help when getting started.

Why not just use language X?

Besides just wanting a new project, I've had a general disappointment in the languages I've used. I have tried out several languages and they fall short of exactly what I'm looking for.

Goals

Here are the goals of the project in no particular order. I expect the to evolve somewhat over time as I continue to build out the language.

Non-goals

Why the JVM?

I'm much more interested in building a language than building a virtual machine, so compiling to an existing VM lets me avoid writing a bunch of code. Compiling to an existing platform also lets me take advantage of the existing library ecosystem instead of needing to build everything from scratch or linking to C libraries. I chose the JVM specifically because I have a lot of experience with Java from my career and because it has an amazing ecosystem of libraries. I also wanted to gain a better understand of how the JVM works and messing with bytecode seems like a great way to go deeper. I've already learned a lot about what's in a classfile and how method invocation works. invokedynamic alone will be the topic of a future post.

Wrapping up

I'm excited to say that is my first ever blog post! I'm going to continue blogging about the process of building Sasquach with a mix of short and long form posts. If you have any questions, feedback, or comments, please send it to sasquach at pentlander.com. Shout out to @feoh and @andyc on lobste.rs for encouraging me to blog in the first place!

Update 1: I used some terms that don't accurately reflect my intentions, I've crossed them out and replaced them with the correct terms. I've also update the Haskell section with a disclaimer.

#jvm #pl #sasquach