thinkbox.txt

Quinoa future features / internal implementation details

Note: I know nothing about programming languages so these ideas are likely
      to be absolutely abyssmal and break every rule of sane language design
===

FlaggedType
some types may have flags associated with them (at compile time) such as
- b'heaped
- b'nomodify
- b'owned
- O'scoped_to


Compiler Implemented Module $Internal
exposes traits which the compiler can use
such as drop, copy, ... (inspired heavily by rust)


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Memory safety feature to avoid losing pointers:
- disown (keyword name w.i.p)
- steal  (likewise)
- #[disowns] (attribute that propogates to all functions which disown memory, used explicitly for stdlib memory functions)

What does disown do?
- Can only be used on a type labelled as 'owned'
- if used in a return statement 'return disown ptr;'
  the calling function is forced to manage the memory
  returned by the function
- Only heap-allocated values may be disowned
- If a function has a disowned return value,
  all return statements must disown
- stolen parameters must explicitly be disowned

what does steal do?
- It is a flag on function parameters
- acts as a way to pass 'owned' values to functions
- stolen parameters can be optimized to be pointers

NOTE:
once a value is disowned, it cannot be used as doing so would be u.b
if one control path disowns a value, all other paths must also disown  (TODO: possibly add syntactic sugar for this)
All owned variables must be definitely disowned before the end of a function (prevents heap memory leaks)


IDEAS:

This pattern may see extensive use, not sure where yet.
you could somewhat think of a function defined like this
as a transformation on data (old state -> new state)
without the copy overhead
```
func foo(steal val : T) -> T{
  // change the state of val here
  return disown val;
}
```


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Throw away the current import system
In the compiler cli, pass the '-i' flag
followed by a json string to represent each
available source file, and metadata associated
with them
example:

$ quinoa build ./main.qn -i "{\"__std__::io\" : \"/home/user/quinoa/libq/io.qn\"}" 

This is painful to use directly, but would be extremely useful for the future build system `chia`

--------------------------
-- STANDARD LIBRARY TODOS
--------------------------

Get rid of `syscall.qn` and write a glibc wrapper `@libc::foo`
with nice error handling (reads errno)