[Media] Keel 0.3 (alpha..?) - a very fast, statically-typed interpreted language written in Rust - now with a standard library, a map type, prettier errors, and a docs website

Hello!

Keel 0.3 (alpha) is now out!

Keel is a fast, statically-typed interpreted language that aims to combine Rust-like syntax with Python's ease-of-use.

It's ~2-10x faster than Python, and competitive with LuaJIT (-joff). It does full type inference, is statically-typed and requires zero annotations (except for dylibs and structs). It has FFI support, meaning you can call functions from dynamic libraries directly from Keel with a "native" (easy) syntax. It's embeddable in other programs through a C ABI.

Keel ships both a binary and a dynamic library artifact, making it easy to embed it. However, keep in mind that the embedding API doesn't have memory/instruction limits yet.

Changelog:

Keel now ships a standard library, currently it's just Keel wrappers over native C: std/math, std/time, and std/random
Libraries placed in the libs/folder next to the Keel executable can be imported from anywhere
That standard library is now included in every binary release artifact and native libraries are compiled per-platform
New Map type! The syntax is {key: value, key1: value1}, the type annotation is [K: V]. Available methods are .get() and .insert().
Union types are now valid (meaning int | string is now a valid type) but they're currently very experimental and aren't really useful
Many errors are now much more useful, more helpful, and clearer. This includes some common compiler/parser errors. Please note that all errors haven't been upgraded yet, it's a process, so some errors will be cooler than others, but this'll improve over time. Some of those upgraded errors are also fixed and now report the error on the correct source file
The compiler and the VM have been optimized, the compiler now uses a single unified compilation path, and literal compilation and register allocation are finally uniform. Concerning the VM, redundant bounds checks have been removed.
Multiple bug fixes
Also: licenses are now shipped in the artifacts
And there's a documentation website now! URL: https://docs.keel-lang.com/

This is the third post for Keel, I don't know if I should keep posting for every release, but we'll see.

Any feedback is appreciated!! (Questions too)

Keel v0.3.0: https://github.com/horacehoff/keel/releases/latest

Repo: https://github.com/horacehoff/keel

Documentation: https://docs.keel-lang.com/

Website: https://keel-lang.com/

Online playground: https://keel-lang.com/playground (single-file, so the standard library doesn't work there)