Backburner Month 02: Virgil
This is an entry from a list of projects I hope to some day finish. Return to the backburnered projects index.
What is it? A typed, non-Turing-complete configuration language that is otherwise identical to JSON. The goal is that all valid JSON files will also be valid Virgil files.
{
"name": "Ash",
"age": 44,
"pets": [
{"name": "Spot", "species": "Dog"},
{"name": "Henry David Thoreau", "species": "Dog"}
]
}
However, in addition to the usual JSON extensions like comments and trailing commas, it would also allow “splices”, which would allow for snippets of code to be included that would evaluate to other JSON expressions.
{
"name": "Ash",
"age": `(22 * 2),
"pets": `[ {"name": n, "species": "Dog"}
| n <- ["Spot", "Henry David Thoreau"]
],
}
It would also include a type system built largely around structural types, so that you can enforce that your functions are used correctly, but with the types inferred from use instead of explicitly written:
`let double(obj) {obj["n"] * 2}
[ `double({"n": 5}), # okay
`double({"n": false}), # error, because `obj["n"]` is a boolean
`double({"x": 0}), # error, because no key `"n"` exists
]
The definable functions would also be limited to strongly normalizing (i.e. non-Turing-complete) ones, so recursion would be entirely disallowed:
`let fact(n) {
if n == 0 { 1 }
else { fact(n-1) } # error: recursion
}
`[ fact(i) | i <- range(10) ]
Importantly, the goal of this project would be not simply to implement the Virgil language, but to implement the libraries in a way that has an API indistinguishable from existing JSON libraries. The goal would be that a project could decide to use Virgil by simply swapping an import: no other change would be necessary.
Why write it? It's worth noting that there are now two other major contenders in this space: one of them is Dhall, the other is Jsonnet. My original notes on Virgil actually predated Dhall itself (although they were indeed inspired by this tweet by Gabriella Gonzales, who would go on to create Dhall) but the end goal was a language that would in some ways sit exactly between the space occupied by Dhall and Jsonnet. Unlike Dhall and like Jsonnet, it would restrict itself to only expressing data that could be expressed in JSON (and therefore the final output could not include e.g. functions) and could exist as a near-drop-in replacement to any program that already used JSON. Unlike Jsonnet and like Dhall, it would include a static type system and would be Turing-complete.
In theory, had I written it when I first considered the idea, it might have tackled some of the use-cases that Dhall and Jsonnet have now cornered. At this point, I don't think it necessarily brings enough to the table to unseat either of them in their intended use-cases, but I still think it'd be a fun project to write.
Why the name? Like the historical Virgil, it takes the story of J(a)SON and adds a bunch of extra stuff to it.