[bgongfu]

And since composition is seamless, and they're relatively trivial to implement; they make great glue/DSL/process description languages. Take off as in replace C++ or Java, probably not. I see them more as a complement to existing languages, a more convenient way to glue the pieces together. Even wrote my own [0] to see how far it's possible to push that idea in C.

[0] https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl

[rurban]

Interesting. But does cixl really do refcounting on stack values? It should only be done on aggregates or objects reaching out into the heap, not on int or float primitives on the stack.

[bgongfu]

Primitive types such as booleans, int, floats, times etc. are passed by value.

Reference counting is only used for heap allocated values and types that themselves reference values, like pairs and tables.

https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl/blob/master/src/cixl/bo...