Hello HN. There's still a long road ahead for the project, but since I've recently closed the loop on bootstrapping the language's core within itself, I thought now's as good a time as any to throw it out there and start getting other people's takes on it.

Chirp is my attempt at engineering a programing language from the ground up that packs together all my favorite bits and pieces into one tight and consistent package. It's got a bit of Rust, a bit of Zig, a LOT of TypeScript, and a lot more LISP than I initially expected.

What sets it apart is its treatment of sets as a trait, and how they are used to express constraints on variables while keeping the code as boring and straightforward as possible.

Here's a taste:

  let fizz = { x:int | x % 3 == 0 };
  let buzz = { x:int | x % 5 == 0 };
  let fb_range = 0 ..= 100;

  let eval(v: fb_range) = match v {
    fizz ∩ buzz => "fizzbuzz",
    fizz => "fizz",
    buzz => "buzz",
    `any => f"{v}"
  };

  for (v ∈ fb_range) `print(eval(v));

To manage expectations: Code emission isn't ready yet. As things stand, it's effectively a scripting language with an intuitive set-centric syntax and runtime constraint checking. But, especially since scripting a compiler is what it's meant to do, I think it's still enough to show around a bit.