henryluo

Thanks for your prophecy :-)

LambdaJS engine is quite complete on JS features, but performance wise, it is only about the same as Quick JS, much slower than Node/V8.

Author of Lambda script here. Your feedback welcome!

Yes, I thought of this issue when I name it Lambda. But I like the name 'Lambda'. Once get over the initial stage, Lambda will be easy for people to remember.

thanks.

As for the performance, I'm standing on the shoulder of great tools like MIR JIT compiler.

Lambda's PDF support is still very limited at moment. I do plan to enhance it in next release.

Glad to hear that. Note that the language is still being developed, and there're bugs here and there. So bear with those bugs. But it should be fun to try it out.

Hope it will change the way people work with data and documents.

While Lambda still has a pretty static GUI at the moment. My plan is to build it into a fully interactive, editable UI on all kinds of document data.

As for the '<' and '>' to open and close an element, there are two potential kinds of syntax design. Option 1 is to use some explicit delimiters. Mark 1.0 has settled on '<' and '>'. Mark 0.11 was using '{' and '}', which I felt confusing with map. So I changed to '<' and '>', to make it consistent with HTML/JSX and XML, which most developers are already used to. Option 2 is to use indentation to delimit the enclosed child content, like in Python and YAML.

Option 2 looks cleaner for configuration kind of usage. However, Mark is designed to be embedded in a scripting language, and used beyond just configuration files. Unless the scripting language uses indentation as delimiter, like Python, option 2 will not work.

Personally, I prefer C/Java/JS family of languages that has insignificant whitespace. So Mark is designed to use explicit delimiters '<' and '>' to enclose an element.

Hope that explains one of the most important syntax designs of Mark.