Discussion

Egel is a toy language implementing an eager untyped combinator calculus as a term rewriting system on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) through lifting C++.

What does that mean? You can easily conclude a number of things from that although you can discuss those conclusions endlessly.

1. Egel is untyped. That means a lot but among others that it doesn’t scale very well, though Lisp, Javascript, and Python practitioners might disagree with that. Types are great, however, for short programs they don’t matter much, with types you just pay a little for static guarantees.
2. Terms are rewritten. Well, that’s likely not a fast language and although the interpreter gives reasonable performance it indeed isn’t fast. Though, through Herculean effort, term rewrite systems can be made performant, I don’t have that much time. However, the interpreter gives you a pretty robust system and that’s worth something too.
3. It rewrites a DAG. Right, no mutation since that would mean you could introduce cycles. The interpreter implements some unsafe extensions which ameliorate that a bit but in principle you don’t have access to that. The language is Turing complete, however, you’ll need to be an avid functional programmer. I hope that going with a DAG will pay off in the distant future since it trades off global analysis for local analysis during garbage collection.
4. C++. That’s another tradeoff. C++ objects are heavyweight so you pay again in performance but you get a bit more reliable system back. The good part is that it is relatively easy to safely drop C++ functionality into combinators.

In conclusion, Egel is a solution for people who need a small declarative easily extendable language which effortlessly binds to C/C++ and who don’t expect to write very large or imperative programs. It tries to support a niche market.

Apart from that, you can have great fun writing Egel programs so don’t let any of the above stop you!