Bosque

The Bosque Programming Language project is a ground up language & tooling co-design effort focused on is investigating the theoretical and the practical implications of:

1. Explicitly designing a code intermediate representation language (or bytecode) that enables deep automated code reasoning and the deployment of next-generation development tools, compilers, and runtime systems.

2. Leveraging the power of the intermediate representation to provide a programming language that is both easily accessible to modern developers and that provides a rich set of useful language features for developing high reliability & high performance applications.

3. Taking a cloud-development first perspective on programming to address emerging challenges as we move into a distributed cloud development model based around microservices, serverless, and RESTful architectures.

The Bosque Programming Language builds on the strengths of classical Functional Programming, modern TypeScript/Node.js, and the power of the new IR. The result is a language that simultaneously supports the kind of high productivity development experience available to modern developers while also providing a resource efficient and predictable runtime, scaling from small IoT up to heavily loaded cloud services. In addition to bringing all the expressive power expected from a modern language, the Bosque language also introduces several novel features like Typed Strings and API Types, that directly address challenges faced by developers working in a distributed cloud based world

The move into cloud based development, with architectures based around microservices, serverless functions, and RESTful APIs, brings new challenges for development. In this environment an program may interoperate with many other (remote) services which are maintained by different teams (and maybe implemented in different languages). This forces APIs to use least-common denominator types for interop and creates the need for extensive serialize/deserialize/validate logic. Further, issues like cold-service startups, 95% response times, resiliency and diagnostics, all become critical but have not been design considerations in most traditional languages.

To simplify collaboration with other researchers and the wider developer community this project is setup around an open-source (MIT) licensed GitHub repository. This project welcomes community contributions including, issues, comments, pull requests and research based on or enhancing the Bosque language.