Hello Everyone!

I'm happy to announce the official release of the Stanza programming

language! Stanza is a new optionally-typed general purpose programming

language from the University of California, Berkeley. It was designed

to help programmers tackle the complexity of architecting large

programs and significantly increase the productivity of application

programmers across the entire software development life cycle. You can

check out the website here: www.lbstanza.org.

Gambit Scheme was instrumental in the design and development of

Stanza. The first prototype for Stanza was hacked together in a month

as a collection of Scheme macros. This enabled us to experiment with

many of the organizational techniques of multi's and methods within

Stanza's unique object system. Having a REPL at our fingertips meant

that we could evaluate multiple designs per day. Just change the macro

definition, and then try out the revised language in the REPL! 

The second prototype for Stanza was written entirely using Gambit and

used Scheme as the target language. This enabled us to fine-tune all

of the semantics of Stanza without having to deal with the details of

code generation. Two features of Gambit/Scheme was critical. First, a

dynamically typed target language is much much nicer as a target

language than a statically typed one; *especially* if the language

you're compiling already has its own type system. Second, Gambit's

amazingly fast continuations implementation enabled us to design all

of Stanza's coroutine system by first expressing it through

continuations, and optimizing the implementation only after the

semantics were figured out. If you're doing any sort of experiment

with control flow, full continuations are a must!

Finally the bootstrap compiler for Stanza was written in Gambit and

generated x86 assembly code. And now, at version 0.9.0, Stanza is

entirely self-hosted. Though Gambit is no longer a part of the

implementation of Stanza, it had a great influence on its

design. Stanza is essentially a (highly-decorated) Scheme at heart,

with an optional type system layered on top, coupled with an object

system built on multimethods. Stanza's interface to C took a lot of

cues from Gambit's FFI system as well.

So thanks Gambit! And also thanks Mark for being so encouraging when I

ran into you at ICFP 2013 and for patiently explaining Gambit's

continuation implementation to me.

We've been using Stanza internally at Berkeley for about two years

now, and we've designed a hardware language called FIRRTL, a teaching

language called Feeny for teaching a graduate course on virtual

machines, and a tool for automatically generating circuit boards for

robotics. Now, Stanza is stable and mature enough for us to feel

confident to share it with everyone. We hope you'll check it out!

   -Patrick