Jekyll: To and Fro C with OCaml and Haskell like features?
Scott Rippee @ 8:29 pm March 28th, 2006
Now this looks like a new language that I could get interested in.
Jekyll allows programmers to gain the advantages of modern high-level programming languages, without having to go through the pain of moving away from C. Jekyll does this by being losslessly translatable to and from C.
Features
* Lossless translation to and from readable C
* Most C programs are valid Jekyll programs
* All unsafe features must be marked as “unsafe” to avoid a warning
* Haskell-style type-classes
* Type classes (a la Haskell)
* Parametric polymorphism
* Tagged unions
* Lambda expressions and closures
* Safety checking
* Checked stack pointers
What else can happen?
* The code base can continue to be in C - but with some editing done in Jekyll.
* Programmers can move to Jekyll one at a time, with C and Jekyll programmers working on the same file concurrently.
* Jekyll programs can be compiled using existing C compilers.
* Jekyll can use C libraries just as easily as C programs can.
* C tools can work with the C version of a Jekyll program.
* If Jekyll ever ceases to be supported, you can continue to work with the C versions.
I have also been wanting to try out Haskell, which makes this option interesting. Sounds good, but I will have to try this out before any more speculation..