Features

This entry contains a whirlwind list of Final’s other features. Each it explained in detail in its own entry. Now that you’ve had a basic introduction to Final, you are free to browse around. However it is recommended to first read the topics in the Foundations section, to get a good grounding of Final’s core constructs and operations.

• efficient OpCode-based VM with fast jump-table dispatch
• full support for Types and Objects
• concise, expressive “compound path” syntax for object operations
• auxilliary stacks, for convenient object parking and access
• support for Interators, and convenient foreach iterated loop
• excellent assortment of often-used collection types
• { … } and sm} builders for DynamicObject and StringMap; DynamicObject .clone^ for prototype-style copies; StaticObject via do.newStatic^ for fixed-schema rows
• TypedObject class constants plus Final methods via : Type#method … ; (instance) and : Type##method … ; (class)
• Table — columnar collection with schema from DynamicObject / TypedObject / Types; StaticObject rows; stable sortByOrd / sortByName
• full support for Unicode strings as Utf-8, including efficient Rune iteration; wide variety of str:: operations
• DateTime and Interval support, with formatting via dt::fmt (plus constants such as DateTime.iso, Interval.clock)
• expressive and convenient ( ) operators for creating value list to fmt operator
• support for a variety of variants of TextStream and ByteStream interfaces:
  • files
  • strings (reading) StringBuilder (writing)
  • stdio
• File system — File, FileInfo, Dir, Path; metadata, copy/move/delete, directory iteration
• Regex, including compiled regex, matches, selectors
• full Json rendering and parsing
• Threading, Pipes, and Atomic threadsafe objects
• Web Dial (Http GET/POST) and Web Listen (HttpListener — ServeMux routes, path params, REST methods, Pip-per-route handlers)
• SQL databases via DbProvider (Postgres, MySQL, SQLite); iterable result rows as DynamicObjects; iter>list
• Env and Moniker — cwd .env + process environment; opaque DSN / secret handles with $KEYNAME substitution
• Cryptography — Hash (MD5 checksum, SHA-256), Hex/Base64, SecureRandom, Key, Cipher (AES-256-GCM / ChaCha20-Poly1305), Ed25519 / X25519, Mac (HMAC-SHA-256), Kdf (HKDF-SHA-256, Argon2id)
• Linear Algebra: VecNf / Mat2f, vec:: / mat::, OLS fit / compare / predict
• try / catch / finally / throw — recoverable exceptions (invalid JSON throws rather than panicking)
• Modules (local install / import) and .fnlp projects (loadProject)
• Session configuration (sess.config) and pluggable logging (logInfo, …)
• forget: reload marks — inclusive wipe back to a mark word for load → try → reload without process relaunch
• Security Restrictions, to restrict operations like file access, web dialing, listening, databases, crypto, threading, and module install/import, for embedded/AI scenarios
• LockSession — exclusive Send hold so an agent turn is not interleaved
• full example of a Web-based chat-like app that provides Final as a tool for the Agent
• finalembed / finalgo Go packages for embedding Final in other Go programs, with Session and Send semantics
• VS Code / Cursor Final extension for .fnl — TextMate highlighting, 2-space indent, sandwich snippets (local VSIX / F5 install)
• Raspberry Pi 5 support, for writing Pi-based control systems.
• Command line support, OS pipes, shebang scripts (Unix-like only)
• Raster blitting and drawing operations (all Final versions)
• GUI support via Fyne controls, final-gui binary
• support for Games and Simulations via SimGame framework
• Sound support via SoundPlayer and Sound objects

Near-term Features Planned

• Language-server features for the editor (dictionary completion, stack-effect hover, diagnostics)
  • build on compiler execution state tracking
• Compiler execution state tracking
  • catch stack bugs: underflow/leak
  • find opportunities to use strongly typed axioms rather than polys
• Markdown parsing
• Html and Xml rendering
• Interactive Web tutorials, using a sandboxed Final Session