Astro a new language designed specifically for WebAssembly

Posted 2021-04-25 Lambda在线

This is a similar effort to Forest https://github.com/appcypher/astro 

What is Astro?

Astro is a fullstack multi-paradigm programming language designed for high-performance numerical-computing applications.

Astro is a

• statically-typed language that

• compiles to native code and WebAssembly,

• has no GC,

• has a syntax similar to Python,

• provides full type inference, and

• has first-class support for data-race-free concurrency.

Why create yet another programming language?

The language creator had a set of requirements (listed above) not met by any single language. Although, the project started as an educational effort, it later shaped into a language designed to meet those requirements.

SIMD, threads and direct access to Web APIs are planned for WebAssembly. These and the proposed GPU Compute standards will make the web a desirable HPC target in the near future. Astro fullstack nature makes developing high-performance apps for web and/or desktop seamless, easier and less frustrating.

Astro has no runtime Garbage Collector (GC) as it is expected to be fast enough to develop games, scientific simulations and other real-time software. This also makes it suitable for embedded software development even though it's not a goal.

In addition, Astro makes some design decisions that are intuitive for numerical computing applications. For example, it has builtin support for vectors, matrices, vectorization, unicode identifiers, etc.

In order to match up with the expressiveness and productivity of dynamic programming languages, Astro adds full type inference, and several other high-level language features that increase productivity. A typical Astro program looks very much like its Python translation.