Guava

tl;dr: Guava is a statically typed language with some handy features:

• multiple inheritance
• operator overloading
• generics, which can have variance
• a Top and Bottom type
• primitives which behave like normal objects
• and lots more!

Overview

Guava is a new OOP language with a simple but powerful type system.

Guava has native types, but no primitive types. For example, a Char object is implemented as a native type for efficiency. But unlike a Java char, Char has methods, extends other types, and can be used as a generic argument.

Guava also has array types, but to the programmer, they look no different from any other types. Although Array is a native type, it fits nicely into the type hierarchy: it extends Sequence, which extends Collection, etc.

As in Scala, Guava lets you specify the variance of generic parameters. So an Array[Char] is also an Array[Top], and an Ordering[Sequence] is also an Ordering[Array].

Guava encourages immutability, but provides both mutable and immutable versions of many data structures. For example, MutableSet[T] declares add and remove methods which mutate the structure and return nothing, while ImmutableSet[T] declares add and remove methods which create and return new ImmutableSets without modifying the current one. Both extend the more general Set[T].

Guava has a Top type which, like Java's Object, sits at the top of the type hierarchy. Guava also has a Bottom type, which behaves like Scala's Nothing: it is a subtype of every other type, but it is impossible to instantiate. This is very useful in combination with generic variance. The empty linked list (EmptyList) type extends List[Bottom], and since a List[Bottom] is also a List[T] for any other T, you can use it as the basis of any other list. Creating multiple empty lists is hence unncessary, and in fact impossible since EmptyList is a singleton type.

Guava supports operator overloading. The expression x + y is just syntactic sugar for x.+(y). Types can also overload the subscript operator by implementing get and/or set methods. For example, the type Array[T] contains methods which look like this:

T get(Int index);
T set(Int index, T val);

Here are a few examples of what you can do with operator overloading:

Sequence[Int] s = {1, 2, 3} * 10;
repeat (s(5))
  Console.outln("hey " * 2 + "world");

You can even implement static get and set methods to make a type name behave like a map. This is useful for writing pseudoconstructors which, unlike real constructors, may perform interning.

Instance methods can be invoked statically. Top.==(a, b) will always perform an identity comparison, whether or not a's type implements its own == method.

Guava has no null references. Instead, it has a Maybe type similar to Haskell's Maybe or Scala's Option.

Guava's standard library embraces inheritance in a major way. For example, the MutableDeque type extends MutbleStack and MutableQueue. If you write a function which reverses a MutableStack, you can feed it an ArrayDeque, a DynamicArray, a MutableSinglyLinkedList, etc. Guava's powerful type system and careful API design allow these relationships to be expressed, while strictly adhering to substitutability.

Building

Building and running Guava is easy:

git clone [email protected]:dlubarov/guava.git
cd guava
./compile
./run-demos
./run-tests

Note that these scripts require Bash 4.0 or higher.

Since Guava has no dependencies or generated code, it is also trivial to build it using any Java IDE.