FAQ.md

Frequently Asked Questions

Are other targets being considered?

The Funcgo compiler is likely to only ever emit Clojure. However, that means it already has good support for the JVM and JavaScript targets, and in addition there are projects to have Clojure target Android and the CLR, and perhaps there will be more targets in future. If there is enough interest, Funcgo can tweak its Clojure output appropriately for new targets, as it already does for Clojure versus ClojureScript.

Does it support numerical programming?

Funcgo can readily call Java code, so it supports numerical programming or linking in C++ code to the same extent that Java does. It can also of course directly use any Clojure numerical programming library such as core.matrix.

Does it support operator overoading?

Yes, it supports limited operator overloading.

Is this a full implementation of Go as the "Functional Go" name implies?

No. Perhaps it would be better named "Glojure". The language is fundamentally just syntactical sugar on top of Clojure, though I did try to keep the sugar as close to Go as I could.

Can a programmer use macros (as in Clojure) to modify the language itself.

I do not plan to make it easy to define macros in Funcgo. Inspired by Go's philosophy, I want to limit the scope of the language to keep it somewhat simple. Funcgo however can use macros, so a sufficiently motivated programmer can write macros in Clojure and use them in Funcgo.

So Funcgo is really just Lisp without parentheses... again.

Basically yes, or put it another way, it is Lisp with more syntax. The fact that Lisp has so little syntax is beautifully elegant from a mathematical point of view, but that is I believe at the expense of readability, at least for programmers coming from other programming traditions. Of course readability is somewhat subjective and I understand that for long-time Lisp programmers, Lisp is perfectly readable.

How does the user keeps track of the source location (source map)?

I have plans to implement source maps when targeting JavaScript. I have not yet figured out the best way to do something equivalent when targeting the JVM. This is one of several tool-chain issues. In addition to stabilizing the language itself, getting a smooth tool-chain is the biggest thing left to do before a 1.0 release of Funcgo. (Though it is worth noting that Coffeescript, an analogous language, got widespread adoption before tackling the source location issue.)

Credit

Some of these questions are paraphrased from some threads on Hacker News. Thanks to the posters there.