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Introduction to Programming in ATS
64 points by ibobev
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9 comments
srean
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ATS used to be discussed quite a lot on HN
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20ATS%20Programming%20Lang...
MLton and Felix would be two other ML inspired languages that whole program optimizes to generate fast code.
ashkankiani
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I took a lot of inspiration from MLton for my WIP programming language. I want to take inspiration from ATS but it's a bit more complicated. I keep it as a bit of a potential north star.
These are definitely all languages I wish more people learned about when designing. I think LLMs are at least helpful in pointing them out when used for deep research but only if people are thinking in that direction.
ddellacosta
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Fun talk on this language here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0OQb1DBko ("A (Not So Gentle) Introduction To Systems Programming In ATS" by Aditya Siram)
esafak
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Looks interesting. Actively developed : https://github.com/githwxi/ATS-Postiats
edit: You are right, I did not know there was a third version. If only this thing had release notes. I have no idea the current state of the language is. Hongwei, if you're listening!
If this language is going to be a thing it needs community development.
mlinksva
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It's "very very minorly" (that's the only commit message used) difficult to follow, but I'm pretty sure ATS2 (Postiats) is in maintenance mode (activity is build changes), with ATS3 (Xanadu) https://github.com/githwxi/ATS-Xanadu being the focus of active development.
doublec
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ATS2 has been effectively frozen for a number of years, the recent commits have mostly been build changes so it can compile ATS3. ATS2 is stable and usable today and release notes are in the CHANGES-ats2 in the repo. I have a few posts showing some of the features on my blog (https://bluishcoder.co.nz/tags/ats/) for ATS2 and the previous version, ATS1. ATS3 is under development. It compiles itself but from what I can tell it is not generally usable at the moment. It's main design change is two-layer type checking. ML-style first, dependent types on top, in an attempt to lower the learning curve. The ats-lang-users google group is probably the best place to follow progress.