Brendan Hansknecht (Feb 12 2022 at 05:40): Brendan Hansknecht (Feb 12 2022 at 05:40):could we do examples/hello-wold/app-zig.roc and then examples/hello-world/platform-zig/... and same for the other languages...except not exactly that cause I don't quite like it....
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 05:41):Haha I was just about to suggest something similar
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 05:42):examples/
...
hello-world/
apps/
HelloC.roc
HelloRust.roc
HelloWeb.roc
HelloZig.roc
platforms/
hello-c/
...
hello-rust/
...
hello-web/
...
hello-zig/
...
...
I like it except that Hello*.roc will all be exact duplicate files bar the platform line.
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 05:43):I like that this would newly demonstrate that platform dirs can be named whatever you want.
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 05:44):I like it except that
Hello*.rocwill all be exact duplicate files bar the platform line.
That can be a fun learning step - try switching the platform!
Brendan Hansknecht (Feb 12 2022 at 05:45):Yeah, maybe just make one Hello.roc with commented out lines for the other platforms.
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 05:45):platform "../platforms/hello-rust" # Try changing this to a different Hello World platform!
...
Yeah, now I like this
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 05:47):Great, so the primary insight here is that the boundaries between /examples/**/ sub-directories can be blurred - apps/ & platforms/ sub-sub-directories enable logical groupings.
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 05:49):I expect that to encourage more app/platform contributions to the /examples/, rather than seeming like an entire new /examples/**/ subdirectory must be added at a time.
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 05:52):Should the "top-level" subdirectories all be logical groupings?
examples/
algorithms/
...
benchmarks/
...
hello-world/
...
interactive/
...
some-other-grouping-im-forgetting/
...
That would help guide newcomers' eyes, as well as enabling veterans to add lots of examples without bloating the "top level"
Philippe (Feb 12 2022 at 17:54):I was about to look at doing the advent of code (at least just the start) in Roc.
Instead of creating my own repo, should I create a new "grouping" for it?
Anton (Feb 12 2022 at 18:27):@Philippe Hosey-Vinchon I think creating a separate repo is best in that case, have fun :)
Philippe (Feb 12 2022 at 18:28)::) ok
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 18:33):Yeah, there's a variety of places to put Roc code:
examples/ dir is good for learning and experimentingexamples/ dir is for all official educational examples of Roc code jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 18:35):That said, it could be very educational to have an official examples/advent-of-code-2021/ dir, to showcase practical code in idiomatic style! What do others think of a crowdsourced+vetted set of AoC21 solutions?
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 18:37):(It could also provide healthy organic pressure on the feature roadmap, to achieve cleaner solutions.)
Anton (Feb 12 2022 at 18:43):One thing I'm thinking of is that examples should be diverse and a lot of AoC stuff would be pretty similar.
I feel it would be good to link to projects using roc in the readme and include the AoC repo there.
jan kili (Feb 12 2022 at 18:56):That's true - I think the example groups should be diverse relative to each other, but I'm fine with similarity within a group (like how benchmarks or CLI are right now, for example)
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 13:37):I've finished a second pass at this reorganization, feedback welcome! https://github.com/rtfeldman/roc/pull/2470
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 15:36):Summary: combines helloworlds, algorithms, and interactives into 3 multi-platform directories
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 15:36):Screen-Shot-2022-03-04-at-8.29.38-AM.png
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 15:37):Is this intuitive?
Johannes Maas (Mar 04 2022 at 15:41):That's a very helpful organization. Much easier to discover different kinds of examples. I'm already curious to have a closer look at the "interactive" ones. :wink:
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 15:41):New hello_world.roc example:
app "hello_world"
packages { pf: "c-platform" }
# To switch platforms, comment-out the line above and un-comment one below.
# packages { pf: "rust-platform" }
# packages { pf: "swift-platform" }
# packages { pf: "web-platform" } # See ./web-platform/README.md for special instructions.
# packages { pf: "zig-platform" }
imports []
provides [ main ] to pf
main = "Hello, World!"
(Edited to make Zig the default)
(Edited to make C the default again)
Folkert de Vries (Mar 04 2022 at 15:45):could we make zig the default one here? it is generally the fastest, and has the most debug stuff in place
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 15:46):@Brendan Hansknecht I had no idea that you'd implemented a full interpreter for another language in Roc! The false-interpreter/ was fun to read through :)
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 15:52):(Side note, GitHub just added a beta feature for a PR file tree view! I love it)
Screen-Shot-2022-03-04-at-8.51.33-AM.png
Brendan Hansknecht (Mar 04 2022 at 17:30):Yeah, it was fun to write. Will be much nicer once we have byte byte literals and boxing. Then it shouldn't stack overflow anymore. The main iterations will be a while loop in rust instead of the current recursive version that roc doesn't know how to make tail recursive.
Brendan Hansknecht (Mar 04 2022 at 17:30):I think the task chain breaks tail recursion sadly.
Brendan Hansknecht (Mar 04 2022 at 17:32):That or it was a form of nested tail recursion that cause the problem. As in A -> B -> A instead of A -> A
Richard Feldman (Mar 04 2022 at 18:15):could we make zig the default one here? it is generally the fastest, and has the most debug stuff in place
I went with C for the host because I think the most people know C
Folkert de Vries (Mar 04 2022 at 18:17):yes but it's less convenient for us
Folkert de Vries (Mar 04 2022 at 18:17):so for now...
Richard Feldman (Mar 04 2022 at 19:15):well but we know to access the zig one, right? :big_smile:
Richard Feldman (Mar 04 2022 at 19:15):I'm mainly thinking about the experience of someone brand new to the repo who goes straight to hello world and starts poking around
Folkert de Vries (Mar 04 2022 at 19:16):maybe I misunderstood? it looked like there is just one Hello.roc file
Folkert de Vries (Mar 04 2022 at 19:16):where you have to switch comments around to change platforms
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 19:17):There is that, and there's also a hello app for each language, in the platform subdirs
Folkert de Vries (Mar 04 2022 at 19:17):ah, ok
Folkert de Vries (Mar 04 2022 at 19:17):nvm then
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 19:17):Okay, I'll change it back to C (done)
Philippe (Mar 04 2022 at 20:08):How hard would it be to make those available on the online repl?
It would be a good experience to see a list of examples, click on one, modify a line or two, and execute it.
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 20:19):That's certainly feasible but it's quite a long way off right now.
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 20:19):The online REPL uses the WebAssembly development backend rather than the LLVM backend, and it's at an earlier stage of development
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 20:22):But if you're interested in contributing to the Wasm backend we could use the help!
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 20:56):Related, @Brian Carroll is the hello-world/web-platform necessary? Could hello_world.roc build for wasm using any other (zig, rust, c, swift) platform?
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 20:57):What do you mean necessary?
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 20:57):It was a demo on a web page
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 20:57):You can build wasm from any language you like but you need JS to connect it up to the HTML
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 20:58):So that's mainly what it's doing
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 20:58):The JS is the point of that platform
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 20:59):host.js
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 21:01):Sorry, I wasn't clear - after this proposed refactor, there are two folders, examples/hello-world/web-platform (previously examples/hello-web/platform) and hello-world/website (previously some of examples/hello-web/*)
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 21:01):Sorry I'm typing too quickly, it might sound wrong! :laughing:
When I asked what you meant by necessary I was wondering what are we considering necessary or not? I know you're doing some cleanup around that.
So to show web capability we need some JavaScript, there's not really any way aronud that
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 21:02):oh ok
Brian Carroll (Mar 04 2022 at 21:04):OK I haven't really been following the conversation around this too closely so I don't really know the thinking behind this split or why it doesn't fit in this case
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 21:07):What I'm really asking is, should it be possible (on trunk) for examples/hello-web/Hello.roc to run on another platform like examples/hello-zig/platform/?
jan kili (Mar 04 2022 at 21:07):I can take this to PMs if you'd like :)
jan kili (Mar 05 2022 at 02:54):Brian confirmed that examples/hello-world/web-platform/ is necessary and can't be combined with examples/hello-world/zig-platform. Therefore, I'm going to re-combine examples/hello-world/web-platform/ and examples/hello-world/website/. Thanks, Brian!
(Edit: Done, re-combined)
jan kili (Mar 05 2022 at 03:03):One thing he taught me in our PM chat was that any given platform is either designed to run on OSes or on wasm (not just whichever of those two a Roc app developer wishes to target at compile time, which is how I thought it worked)
jan kili (Mar 05 2022 at 11:05):Any objections to the new organization? https://github.com/rtfeldman/roc/pull/2470
If not, I'm ready to merge it and proceed to considering other improvements.
Last updated: Jun 16 2026 at 16:19 UTC