Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

44•beariish•2h ago

I've built many interpreters over the years, and Bolt represents my attempt at building the scripting language I always wanted. This is the first public release, 0.1.0!

I've felt like most embedded languages have been moving towards safety and typing over years, with things like Python type hints, the explosive popularity of typescript, and even typing in Luau, which powers one of the largest scripted evironments in the world.

Bolt attempts to harness this directly in the lagnauge rather than as a preprocessing step, and reap benefits in terms of both safety and performance.

I intend to be publishing toys and examples of applications embedding Bolt over the coming few weeks, but be sure to check out the examples and the programming guide in the repo if you're interested!

Comments

themonsu•1h ago

Looks cool, but please can we stop naming things ”bolt”

acron0•1h ago

If I was still writing games I would be alllllll over this

grodriguez100•1h ago

Sounds very good, and I can see many use cases in embedded systems. But that probably requires 32-bit arm support. Is that planned ?

beariish•1h ago

As of right now no - my primary target when developing this was realtime and games in particular since that's what I know best, but if there's a real target in embedded that's certainly something that could be explored.

MobiusHorizons•1h ago

FYI "the embedded scene" is likely to be interpreted as "embedded systems" rather than "embedded interpreters" even by people who know about embedded interpreters, especially since all the languages you give as an example have been attempted for use on those targets (micropython, lua, and even typescript)

beariish•1h ago

That's a good point, thank you. I've made a small edit to clarify.

thrance•1h ago

Function return type inference is funny but I don't think it's that great of a feature. It makes it harder for a library's consumer to know how to properly use a function, and it also makes it harder for the maintainer to not break backwards compatibility inadvertently. Anyway, I'm all for experimenting.

beariish•1h ago

There's nothing stopping a library author from explicitly annotating return types wherever a stable interface is important, the idea is more for smaller functions or callbacks to make use of this. Perhaps I'll make the examples clearer to reflect the intention.

eulgro•59m ago

The question I ask myself when I see this kind of project is: how long are you willing to maintain it for?

My main concern about a new language is not performance, syntax, or features, but long term support and community.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•53m ago

In the end, weight is a kind of strength, and popularity is a kind of quality. It looks promising but you can't expect long-term support until there's more contributors and users

At this point it is too early to know. Even JavaScript took like 20 years to catch on

brabel•7m ago

The only way to have any idea of how long a language might be still around is to look at how long it's been already around. From this perspective , you can only use older languages. The benchmarks show that Lua (and the Luau and Lua+JIT variants) is actually very competitive, so I'd stick with one of those.

cookiengineer•10m ago

If functions don't have a return signature, does that mean everything must be satisfied in the compilation step?

What about memory management/ownership? This would imply that everything must be copy by value in each function callsite, right? How to use references/pointers? Are they supported?

I like the matchers which look similar to Rust, but I dislike the error handling because it is neither implicit, and neither explicit, and therefore will be painful to debug in larger codebases I'd imagine.

Do you know about Koka? I think that an effect based error type system might integrate nicely with your design choices.

[1] https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/index.html

Vandash•9m ago

game dev for 15+ years here, love the first example on Github this is compiled right? cannot replace lua?

beariish•4m ago

Bolt is not compiled ahead of time, it's bytecode interpreted just like Lua

IshKebab•2m ago

It's compiled in the same way that Lua is compiled. So yes, it can replace Lua.

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Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

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