Squarepants - a functional language for humans and other bottom dwellers

Status

Squarepants is a work in progress; while it can compile itself and create very simple dynamic pages, many of its main features are not ready and everything else is still in flux. Use it at your own risk.

Sample code

          
    log as fn Text, @IO: None =
        fn content, @io:

        !fileDescriptor as IO.File =
            IO.openFile “log.txt” IO.Append @io

        IO.write content @fileDescriptor


    main as fn [Text], @IO: Int =
        fn args, @io:

        List.each args fn arg:
            log arg @io

        0

Accessibility

Design is not a zero-sum game, so Squarepants is designed for and with different people (and in different situations!)

A diverse input makes the design better for everyone, including for already experienced users.

Overview

Squarepants is a small language designed to scale big and still stay clean.
Squarepants implements uniqueness typing, which allows a purely functional language to have efficient mutability, lifetime guarantees and to turn side effects and IO into explicit, pure computations.
Squarepants can already compile itself and has a simple virtual DOM, but is under heavy development and nowhere near anything stable.
The compiler currently targets only JavaScript but the goal is to compile to Web Assembly and WebGPU.
Squarepants' powerful type system allows you to design your logic around your data, modeling your variables so that invalid states cannot even be represented.
Squarepants is fully, end-to-end type-checked at compile time: no "unhandled exception", no "undefined is not a function", no run-time errors: if it compiles, it runs.

Resources

Squarepants on Codeberg
A rough sketch of the roadmap in the GitHub project board
A web page written in Squarepants with a live compiler (the syntax is far from final)
The Slides for the talk: "Uniqueness typing in Squarepants"