Old ideas about an OS from scratch

About five years ago, in 2015, I wrote a rather long document about how to design an operating system from scratch. I won't give the precise context on why I did that. Some people might be able to guess it from the content. There was a question on Quora that I thought I would answer …

From Ada to XL in 25+ years…

At the Paris Open Source Summit, I had a long discussion with engineers from AdaCore, that reminded me of the early roots of XL in Ada. I have never really retraced the steps along the way, and this was an interesting walk for me. I thought I'd share… My interest in programming languages is quite old. …

The Alsys Ada commenting style

Since the beginning of my professional career, I have consistently been using the same commenting style in my code, which turns out to be quite distinctive. I can trace that style back to Alsys SA. There is a really good reason I still follow that commenting style to this day…

Tao3D Libre Edition – Tao is now Open Source

Taodyne just released Tao3D "Libre Edition", a GPLv3 version of Tao3D.

Introduction to the Tao language

The video below is a quick introduction to the Tao language: The source code is accessible on GitHub. You can download Tao Presentations from the Taodyne web site if you want to try it yourself.

Animation and 3D: the web is doing it wrong

In Animation and 3D: the web is doing it wrong, I argue that the way the web does animation and 3D is completely bogus and deserves to die. With Tao Presentations, we offer a dynamic document description language that lets us write shorter code that is much closer to storytelling. We'd like to bring this to the …

Optimize!

Is it normal to wait for your computer? Why should I wait 5 seconds when I click on a menu? Why does it sometimes take half a minute to open a new document? Developers, optimize your code, if only as a matter of public service! What about making it a New Year resolution? Why is …

Designing a new programming language

I've been working for years on a programming language called XL. XL stands for "extensible language". The idea is to create a programming language that starts simple and grows with you. All the work of Taodyne, including our fancy 3D graphics, is based on XL. If you think that Impress.js is cool (and it definitely is), …

Using XL for high-performance computing

There is a little bit of activity on the XLR-Talk mailing list, dedicated to discussions about the XL programming language and runtime. XL is a high-level general purpose programming language I designed and implemented over the years. It exists in two primary flavors, XL2, an imperative statically-typed language, and XLR, a functional flavor. Both share …

Trends in programming languages…

Programming languages are not a branch of mathematics, they are languages. That's how we should analyze them.