Hylo: the safe systems- and generic-programming language built on value semantics
Dave Abrahams
Two years ago at C++Now, with Dimi Racordon, I introduced the C++ community to Hylo (formerly Val), a language founded on strict mutable value semantics (MVS). MVS creates opportunities for safety, ease-of-use, and efficiency, while limiting tensions among those properties, and Hylo's design takes maximum advantage of that synergy. Since then, we've evolved the design, produced a working compiler and the bones of a standard library, and have made some compelling discoveries. Perhaps more importantly, though the implementation is still immature, we've moved past the phase where we describe Hylo as “experimental,” and openly acknowledge our ambitions to create a language that's broadly used in production.
In this talk I'll show the essentials of Hylo's design, discuss the progress we've made in detail, and look at the road ahead. By the end, you'll begin to see the outlines of an inspiring possible future of programming. You may even want to help create that future!
Dave Abrahams
Dave Abrahams is a founding contributor of the Boost C++ Libraries project and the founder of the first annual C++ conference, BoostCon/C++Now. He is a contributor to the C++ standard, and was a principal designer of the Swift programming language. He recently spent seven years at Apple, culminating in the creation of the declarative SwiftUI framework, worked at Google on the Swift for TensorFlow project and, briefly, on the Carbon language, and is now a principal scientist at Adobe's Software Technology Lab, where our mission is to improve the code programmers write through research, education, and tooling.
