Roadmap

Currently more a list of desiderata than a map.

Also see:

• The language TODO
• The issue trackers of the Ursalang projects, in particular:
  • The language issue tracker
  • The web site issue tracker

Areas of concern

Documentation

• Tutorial
• Reference (language and libraries)
• Specification (ditto)
• Ursadoc

Top-level commands

• build
• install
• test
• version
• publish

Packaging

• Simple declarative format (TOML?)
• Produces a set of files (Zip)
  • Containing Ursa/Ark sources (installation may run compiler—arbitrary code!)
• Represent a package as a URL whose scheme specifies whether it points at an archive or repo; a repo can contain packages (npm-like) or sources that need building.
• Controlled namespaces (like npm) can be implemented on top of the above (i.e. we don’t mandate a single canonical repo).

Other compiler backends

• LLVM or BRIL (could be in same repo to start with)
• Scheme (implement Ark in Scheme)
• Python
• 3rd-party types (like Typeshed/DT) for C, JavaScript, Python etc. libraries: need type declarations/parsers for TypeScript, C headers, Java classes, GLib IR etc. Installation of libraries and linking will be back-end–dependent. Pragma in declarations points to code (e.g. shared library). Need “types only” syntax for module declaration. A principled way to do this:
  • Modules, first-class, have a type.
  • Allow declarations without implementation of values (or treat module declarations as interfaces?)

Testing

Something like Rust.

Misc

Auto-detect syntax (JSON/Ursa): use filename, file contents (for #!)

Standard libraries needed

• Introspection
• Data structures
• Math
• Network (client/server; including sockets?)
• File system (including pipes?)
• Terminal?
• Graphics (Canvas ((EaselJS)[]), OpenGL/WebGL ((PixiJS)[]))
• Text rendering
• Text handling (strings)
• Sound
• Keyboard, mouse/pointer
• Parallelism
• Concurrency

(Sockets and pipes give IPC.)

All else via FFIs/pure Ursa libs.