Comparison of Cilia with Other Languages

The following comparison aims to show the exact equivalent of the Cilia code.

Note

• I may not be very familiar with all these languages, or not up to date.
  • Is there really no range operator and no classical for-loop in neither Cpp2 nor Carbon?
• I may not even be sufficiently up to date with C++14/17/20/23/26 either.

Syntax of Carbon and Cpp2

While Carbon and Cpp2 (“C++ syntax 2”) are based on the same basic idea, a new syntax with C++ interoperability, they both have a syntax more resembling Rust than C++.

Someone said in an interview (way back in 2000):

Today, I’d look for a much simpler syntax—and probably clash with people’s confusion between the familiar and the simple.

I like many aspects, especially of Cpp2, but not the name: Type syntax. It indeed does not feel familiar to me, IMHO unnecessarily so. Cilia is a bit more conservative/traditional here. And I think its syntax is still “easy enough” to parse.

Default vs. Explicit Initialization

Arrays, sets, and maps are default-constructed, so they can be used immediately after declaration (for example, to add values in a loop):

String[] words
for i in 0..9 {
    words.pushBack(i.toString());
}

In contrast, languages like Swift, Rust, Kotlin, Java, and C# require explicit initialization of collections before they can be used. After declaration, an instance must therefore be assigned explicitly:

var words: [String] = []
for i in 0...9 {
    words.append("\(i)")
}

In many examples this requirement is “hidden” by immediate assignment of a literal (such as [“one”, “two”, “three”]) or a function return value. It’s not a big deal, but in practice I still find the need for explicit initialization of empty collections somewhat annoying.