News

— Resuming development

A little about development status and what 2023 may hold, and some benchmarks

— New Syntax for if, match and unpackiing-without-match

We’ve two syntax changes we’d like to introduce

— Programming Language Checklist
It's traditional to evaluate any new language using this (in)famous checklist. Let's try it for Plasma.
— Removing Case Sensitivity

We’ve made a change to Plasma’s syntax, removing any case sensitivity in the syntax.

— CI and docker images

Announcing CI and docker images for developers or evaluation

— The Name

I have revised Plasma’s about page and as part of this I have decided to explain why Plasma is called Plasma.

— Closures

Plasma now supports closures

— Onethousand Commits

Plasma now has 1,000+ commits on the master branch

— Garbage collection

Plasma now supports garbage collection (GC). It’s a little further ahead in the roadmap but I started work on it as a self-contained task to experiment with live streaming.

— Resources and resources in higher-order code

A couple of months ago we added support for resources in higher order code, and before that we added resources. This late news item will cover both new features.

— Two and a Half Years

It’s been two and a half years since I started work on Plasma. With the end of 2017 I noticed that many other language projects were publishing retrospectives of their last year. Well with one developer progress is a lot slower, so rather than summarising the last year, I’ll write about the whole history!

— Higher order values

Another item ticked off the roadmap! Higher order values and higher order calls. That’s two items!

— Multi-value functions

Woo, another goal ticked off on the roadmap. Plasma now supports functions that return any number of results.

— Parametric Polymorphism

It’s been some time but we’ve finally ticked off another goal on the roadmap. The basics of parametric polymorphism work. You can define a type, such as List(a), note that a syntax sugar for list cells and lists does not exist yet:

— Match-case statements

We’ve reached another minor milestone. Match-case statements are now supported including some rules for how variables are allowed to be used in branching code. This also means that Plasma is now Turing complete, although it is far from being expressive.

— Presentation At Compose
On the 29th of August I gave a presentation at Compose Melbourne about Plasma's goals and ideas, how it is different from many other functional languages and the current status of the project.

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