Company
Date Published
Author
Amjad Masad
Word count
470
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The PL Jam results have been announced with Basil emerging as the overall winner, taking home $10,000 in prize and grant money. The language impressed judges with its novel ideas on compilation and syntax, as well as its polished implementation, which is a statically-typed and compiled language that leverages white space to reduce parenthesis usage and support infix operators. The compiler is notable for being an interpreter that can interpret any Basil expression, while also statically type-checking the resulting expression tree to prevent dynamic typing or boxing overhead. The entire compiler and runtime fit comfortably in under 400 kB, with no runtime dependencies other than libc. Basil was entirely conceived and implemented during the jam, showcasing elegant and clean code, and comes with a tutorial that teaches the language, making it an exciting project for programming language design.