BAM Weblog

Roy's Big Week

Brian McKenna — 2011-11-27

Roy was submitted to Hacker News about 2 days ago and received over 100 votes and 47 comments! Crazy.

This is after I created a GitHub mirror where Paul Miller filled out the issue tracker. I’m trying to work through the biggest bugs and then move onto extra features. Currently the biggest issue is the lack of recursive data types. That issue is blocking being able to write things like the cons list:

data List a = Cons a (List a) | Nil

(Which is also valid Haskell syntax)

This was actually part of a much bigger problem. Data constructors could only have generic parameters and not solid types specified in value constructors. For example, this wouldn’t work:

data OptionN = SomeN Number | NoneN

And that was also a problem with type aliases:

type OptionS = Option String

Both problems have now been fixed. Now I’m pretty close to fixing the original recursive data type issue.

In other news:

  • Roy now uses Git (clone this new repo if you have an old Mercurial version)
  • Roy is now in DocPad!
  • Roy is now in npm
  • I fixed do notation not being typed correctly

It’s been awesome to see such positive feedback. Thanks everyone.

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