A New Language for Web Services | HackerNoon

Gliimly is a new programming language and framework for developing web services and web applications. The reason for Gliimly is to make software development easier, more reliable and to improve run-time performance. To do this, Gliimly is a very high level language yet it’s a high performance one; those two qualities aren’t usually together.

Gliimly is a declarative language designed for simplicity. That means top-down approach, rather than bottom-up: it’s more about describing what to do than coding it. It’s a modeling language where pieces are assembled together quickly and with confidence. It’s about the framework to create and deploy web services with less effort and faster.

Gliimly is a memory-safe language. Your program is safe from overwriting memory it shouldn’t overwrite, and it won’t leave dangling pointers hanging around. Gliimly is a static-typed language with only three basic types (strings, numbers and boolean) and (currently) the following structured types: service, message, array, index, index-cursor, fifo, lifo, list, split-string and file.

Gliimly is also a high-performance compiled language, designed to create fast and small native executables without interpreters or p-code.

Memory safe languages often suffer performance bottlenecks due to the fact that range checking, garbage collection and other memory management techniques do take their toll.

Gliimly is designed from ground up to alleviate these issues. Firstly, the best way not to lose performance on expensive memory management is not to have one. By default, Gliimly has a light-weight memory safety implementation, and you can expand it if your system is short on memory. In addition, its run-time libraries are written entirely in C and the run-time overhead comes at the input and output of Gliimly statements, and not within libraries. Since libraries do most of the run-time work, the impact of imposing memory safety is minimal.

Underlying Gliimly’s functionality are industry-standard Open Source libraries, such as SSL, Curl, MariaDB and others, in addition to native Gliimly’s.

In extended mode, Gliimly is extensible with any standard libraries (with C interop), which means most programming languages (including C/C++, Rust etc.). In this mode, Gliimly (obviously) does not guarantee memory safety, but it does not necessarily mean it’s not safe either.

Gliimly is very simple to work with – it doesn’t even have expressions in a sense other languages do, save for very basic integer expressions (with plus, minus, divide, multiply). This is by design to reduce complexity and improve performance. Gliimly’s statements aim to deliver complete functionality without complicated coding, and are customizable to a great extent, statically optimized at compile-time for performance.

Gliimly home page is at https://gliimly.github.io and is Free Open Source Software licensed under Apache 2 license.