May 2021 Strict Newbie Experiences
I started on the Strict project two days ago and the past 48 hours have been immensely joyful. Not only do I get to work with my friend Alexandre Bencz, but I am also getting to know several other, highly competent developers, all of whom have a shared passion for programming language design and implementation. The team now consists of five people, including Ben, so stuff is happening and quite fast even!
Obviously, the first few days are very hectic and overwhelming, because of all the new tools, procedures, habits, attitudes, and standards that the newcomer has to learn. I personally expect to learn more from joining this project than I’ve learned on my own during the past 5 years. There’s nothing that can speed up your own development as the process of working with people with the same interests and all kinds of useful skills.
Strict is a great vision, which we are currently working hard to both document and formalize as the compiler begins to take shape. An example of this is that Ben added a draft grammar in BNF format yesterday. This helps everybody on the team and outside to quickly visualize what the project is all about.
The next steps we’re working on are to formalize things like the Intermediate Representation (IR) and talk about the upcoming VM has begun as well, while Alexandre is working busily on the compiler itself. Harald is looking into the IDE support and stuff will happen there soon as well.
My role is, given the short period of employment so far, still a bit uncertain, but I do love to write documentation, so perhaps that will be part of what I do. I hope to return to these pages in not too long, with more exciting news from and documentation for the Strict project, and am already working on various updates to the existing documentation.