Guida programming language

Guida is a functional programming language that builds upon the solid foundation of Elm, offering backward compatibility with all existing Elm 0.19.1 projects.

Vision

Guida builds on the foundations of Elm, aiming to advance the future of functional programming. By translating Elm's compiler from Haskell to a self-hosted environment, Guida helps developers to build reliable, maintainable, and performant applications without leaving the language they love.

Continuity and Confidence (Version 0.x): Guida starts by ensuring full backward compatibility with Elm v0.19.1, allowing developers to migrate effortlessly and explore Guida with complete confidence.

This commitment to continuity means that this version will faithfully replicate not only the features and behaviors of Elm v0.19.1, but also any existing bugs and quirks. By doing so, we provide a stable and predictable environment for developers, ensuring that their existing Elm projects work exactly as expected when migrated to Guida.

Evolution and Innovation (Version 1.x and Beyond): As Guida evolves, we will introduce new features and improvements. This phase will foster a unified ecosystem that adapts to the needs of its users.

Core Principles:

• Backward Compatibility: Respect for existing Elm projects, ensuring a frictionless migration.
• Accessibility: Lowering barriers for developers by implementing Guida’s core in its own syntax.

Our ultimate goal is to create a language that inherits the best aspects of Elm while adapting and growing to meet the needs of its users.

Install

To install Guida as an npm package, run the following command:

npm install -g guida

You should now be able to run guida --version.

Development

Start by installing Node Version Manager.

Switch to the correct node version number by running:

nvm use

Install the dependencies:

npm install

Generate guida:

npm run build

Link the project to run guida command:

npm link

You should now be able to run guida:

guida --help

To compare the performance of guida with elm, you can run ./scripts/performance-comparison.sh.

Examples

To run an example cd into the examples folder, and run the guida make command:

cd examples
guida make --debug src/Hello.elm

You can then open index.html.

Try

Find an example of how to use the browser version of the compiler on the try folder.

Clear cache

To clear all cache and re-generate ./bin/guida.js run the following:

rm -rf ~/.guida guida-stuff; npm run build

Run tests

Run all tests:

npm test

Run jest tests:

npm test:jest

Run elm-test tests:

npm run test:elm

Run elm-review tests:

npm run test:elm-review

Run elm-format validation:

npm run test:elm-format-validate

Format elm source code

npm run elm-format

Publish new npm package version

Before publishing a new npm package version, make sure you are on the correct branch, ie. in case of wanting to publish a 0.x version, you should have the v0.x branch checked out.

To publish a new version, we should then run the following commands:

npm version <newversion>
npm publish
git push origin <currentbranch>
git push origin tag v<newversion>

As an example, these should have been the commands ran for publishing v0.2.0-alpha

npm version 0.2.0-alpha
npm publish
git push origin v0.x
git push origin tag v0.2.0-alpha

The <newversion> value relates to the version field value found on package.json.

References

• Initial transpilation from Haskell to Elm done based on Elm compiler v0.19.1 (more specifically commit c9aefb6)
• Terminal logic implementation based on https://github.com/albertdahlin/elm-posix

Resources

• Hoogle
• Online Haskell Compiler