Celebrating Three Years of Sunder

Three years ago today I began working on the project that would eventually become Sunder. Today we celebrate what will hopefully be the last (major) release for the Project! That's right, after three years full of blood, sweat, and defining language semantics, Sunder is now getting a send-off into the world of Systems Programming.

With this latest release, the plan is to freeze the language and standard library in its current state -- warts and all. Sunder has been stable-ish for the past year or so, but occasional breaking changes have made it difficult for me to invest time into documentation knowing that anything I write might not be accurate in the future. I have also been experimenting with Sunder language bindings to C libraries, a Sunder-native library, and even a networked Settlers of Catan clone. Moving forward, I would like to shift my focus more to these projects without having to worry about the language and standard library shifting beneath my feet.

There is still a good bit of work that can be done to improve the compiler, and there are definitely a few places in the standard library that could use some code cleanup. Over the coming year(s) I will probably still commit to the Sunder repository to fix bugs, clean up backend code generation¹, and add additional operating systems to the list of supported platforms². But for all practical purposes, the Sunder project is complete. Sunder is everything that I ever wanted it to be and more. I think that after three years of hard work, it is time to take a break and enjoy what has become my absolute favorite programming language.

Happy third birthday Sunder!

Footnotes

1. Which is currently fine for the set of Unix-like platforms supported, but relies on having a GNU C compiler such as GCC or Clang available. I am hoping that the additions coming in the C23 standard, coupled with a switch from GNU C statement expressions to some form of destination-driven code generation in emitted C code, will be enough for the complier to emit standards-compliant C code during code generation.

2. I would really like to write a blog post about adding FreeBSD support to Sunder some time this year!