Stream: beginners

Topic: projects

Brian Carroll (Aug 10 2021 at 22:50):

So what are the main projects going on in Roc?

Folkert de Vries (Aug 10 2021 at 23:02):

I'm working on compiler performance a bunch hright now (doing struct-of-array things). We're also working on a compile-time approach to determining if an update can happen in-place

Folkert de Vries (Aug 10 2021 at 23:02):

we already do the reference counting tricks based on recent work on Lean and Koka

Folkert de Vries (Aug 10 2021 at 23:03):

then the big thing I think is the editor. Both the visual/user interaction parts and the underlying infrastructure

Folkert de Vries (Aug 10 2021 at 23:04):

and also now that we have a bunch more people, we run into panics everywhere. There are good error messages, but you don't always get to see them if a panic happens somewhere in the process. So we'll have to fix that

Brian Carroll (Aug 10 2021 at 23:46):

great, thanks for the info!

Richard Feldman (Aug 11 2021 at 01:54):

some other projects in the works besides the compiler internals @Folkert de Vries is working on and the editor improvements @Anton is working on:

• revamping our canonical IR into a more efficient representation where we can allocate and deallocate parts of it on the fly, for use in the editor - @Lucas Rosa has been leading this
• a built-in decimal type (128-bit fixed precision, and as fast as we could get it!) - @Jared Ramirez and @Brendan Hansknecht have been making this happen
• a development backend that goes straight to machine code instead of using LLVM - @Brendan Hansknecht has done a ton of work on this, with others having pitched in here and there
• automatically generated documentation from doc comments - currently on roc-lang.org but intentionally at a URL that's not referenced from the homepage :big_smile: - @Chad Stearns has been making great strides on this
• eliminating the need for linking libc++ and libunwind, which is a prerequisite for a bigger project to dramatically improve linking speed and flexibility - @Joshua Hoeflich is gearing up to tackle this one next!

Richard Feldman (Aug 11 2021 at 01:54):

so yeah, lots of cool stuff going on!

Richard Feldman (Aug 11 2021 at 01:56):

also, outside the development of the language itself, @James Carlson has been working on building a parser combinator in Roc, and he's been extremely patient with all the bugs and sharp edges his project has revealed :big_smile:

Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC