Another Update On The Bagel Language
Hi all. It's been about five months since my last Bagel post, so I wanted to give an update for the handful of you who have been interested/following along (thank you!).
Over the past few months development on the project has slowed down a bit, for two main reasons:
My mental health #
I was starting to burn out a little bit. Feverish coding, very late nights several days in a given week. I took a step back and saw that this was not good for me, so I've given myself permission to slow down and take things at a more sustainable pace. Now I work on Bagel when I feel moved to, and I might go weeks between bursts of motivation. I've decided this is okay. It's a marathon, not a sprint, I'll get there when I get there.
Most of the easy problems have already been solved #
...at least for the MVP. For a while I was able to move at a blistering pace because there were so many low-hanging tasks to be done. But eventually those dried up, and the ones that remained either required a ton of thought/design-work, or were really challenging to implement. With that said, a couple days ago I solved what I think was the last major roadblock to an alpha "release".
What's next #
Right now you could maybe say what I've got is "a code-complete alpha version". All the features needed for the alpha release are there in some form (I think), there are no major existential design questions left (I think), and things generally work at least for the golden cases (mostly).
The next thing I'm doing is building a sample app (not huge, but bigger than just another todo-list) to root out low-hanging bugs, design holes, missing features, etc. I've already found several of those (whee!).
Once I've finished that and addressed all the problems it reveals, I want to write at least some basic preliminary documentation that early-testers can refer to. Once that's done, I'll create a standalone build of the compiler to make it easy for people to play with, and then announce it via another post here.
That first release will be for testers/the curious/language-enthusiasts only! It'll be some time after that before I could recommend using Bagel for anything real. Still, it's an important and very exciting milestone. It's been over 14 months since I started this project; I can't wait to finally show it to people for real.