I'm conflicted about how I should implement UTF8 support for strings in my language, #ArkScript

There seem to be two options:
1. Every string is UTF8, thus every access to a char is O(n) and not O(1) anymore (have to decode the codepoints to count them). Length is O(n) too. That pretty much pessimizes all strings, even ASCII ones, but makes working with UTF8 codepoints easier
2. Every string is just a series of bytes, as it is right now, and a (@ string index) returns a potentially invalid character (on 8 bits). Indexing and length are O(1), but we need a function to get the codepoints, like (string:codepoints str) or (string:graphemes str) or something else
3. third hidden option that I want to avoid and that doesn't really count: introduce another string type that's different from normal strings. That's bad because the C++ API will be impacted, and the internals will need to handle all the different string types

At first, I thought option 1 was better because then everything is easy, since the language is high-level. But now I lean toward option 2 because UTF8 support won't hinder the performance of programs that don't need it, and doing such a thing should be intentional

#pldev

Someone wrote a #discord api client library using #ArkScript 🤯

https://github.com/4surix/arkscord

I don’t know what happened, but #ArkScript got faster than python and slower than Lua, at the same time.

The benchmarks all run on the same machine and the languages versions are fixed.

What the hell

Hey everyone, I'm trying to implement a "slice" function but I'm not sure how to go with negative steps

Let's say we have (slice start end [step])
And
(slice alphabet 0 10) returns abcdefghij

What should this
(slice alphabet 0 10 -1) return?
FWIW, #Python returns nothing for alphabet[0:14:-1]

#pldev #ArkScript

According to my testing, embedding #ArkScript works well with low resources, as it only needs 1MB of disk space and 4.6MB of RAM!

It isn't the tinyest but it isn't the biggest either!

#TinyScheme sits at the top, with only 84KiB of disk and 3MB of RAM needed, and #Lua is close with 271KiB of disk and 1.9MB of RAM

https://github.com/ArkScript-lang/embedded-langs-footprint

I’ve been doing some code golf on code.golf, using my own language, #ArkScript

And I found a fun Quine (program that outputs itself), without using io:readFile:

```
(let _"(let _{:?})(puts(format _ _))")(puts(format _ _))
```

`format` is using fmtlib under the hood, and it’s pretty handy!

People, we have a debugger in #arkscript

https://arkscript-lang.dev/docs/tutorials/debugging/

and it's more tested than the repl somehow (I had to develop a new kind of tests for this one, so that I can skip the prompt and feed it lines from a file)

I’ve learned #arkscript, a language I’ve been working on for a few years now, is being used as a code gold language by people on the internet

And they found bugs (hopefully it’s fixed now, 24 hours after I’ve been informed and started working on the fix)

It is truly awesome, and now I can’t wait to go back to work on more features (the current one being adding a debugger)

I used #ArkScript for the #AdventOfCode and it helped me improve the language as well as find bugs
You can read about the whole adventure on my blog: https://lexp.lt/posts/arkscript_advent_of_code/
Some bugs were very dirty and I’m glad I caught them…

#pldev #compiler

Since the Advent of Code, I've added about 50 new algorithms to #ArkScript standard library it seems
And it won't stop growing, even if I'll probably be the sole user of the language, it's quite fun to put your own stdlib together

https://arkscript-lang.dev/ (with a live counter of algorithms in the stdlib on the frontpage because I could)