Elmord's Magic Valley

Computers, languages, and computer languages. Às vezes em Português, sometimes in English.

The road to Hel (is paved with good intentions)

2019-01-04 00:54 -0200. Tags: comp, prog, pldesign, lisp, hel, fenius, in-english

2019 might just be the year of Hel on the desktop. I mean, not really, but I would like to talk a bit about my prospects for Hel going forward.

For those who don't know, Hel (huangho's Experimental Language/Lisp) is my playground for experimenting with programming language design and implementation ideas. The Hel 0.1 compiler was a very crude translator from a simple Lisp-like language to C, similar in spirit to lows. Hel 0.2 was a bit of an improvement, in that it at least had the rudiments of an intermediate representation. The goal for Hel 0.2 was to be a superset of a subset of R5RS Scheme (i.e., Hel and R5RS would have a common subset), and the compiler itself would be written mostly in this subset; the idea was to eventually be able to compile the Hel compiler with either a Scheme implementation or with the Hel compiler itself, thus bootstrapping the language (i.e., being able to compile the compiler with itself).

My goals have changed a bit, though. First of all, I'm now interested in exploring more the language side rather than the implementation side of the project. I think an interpreter might serve my goals better than a compiler, since it is easier to change and test ideas. The compiler can come later.

Second, I'm not so keen anymore in having a large common subset with Scheme. Multi-shot continuations (call/cc) have always been out of the subset, but as of late I'm willing to question things as basic as cons cells. I may not get that far away from Scheme, but when exploring design options I definitely don't want to be constrained by compatibility. So bootstrappability can come later too.

Third, because I want to write an interpreter, but I don't want it to be terribly slow, I'll probably be switching implementation platform. So far I had been doing development on GNU Guile, but I'll probably switch to either Chez Scheme (a pretty fast R6RS Scheme implementation), or SBCL (a pretty fast Common Lisp implementation). SBCL has the advantage of having more libraries available (and Common Lisp itself is a larger language than that provided by Chez), while Chez has the advantage of being (in principle) closer to Hel (although that's kind of moot if bootstrapping is not an immediate goal anymore). I thought SBCL would also be faster than Chez, but in my highly scientific benchmark (running (fib 45) on each implementation), Chez is actually faster out of the box, though SBCL is faster if type declarations are provided.

So what are my goals for Hel 0.3? Well:

There are other things (some of which I intend to write about in the future), but I think these are the most important ones.

Wish everyone a happy new year, and may our living-dead open source projects thrive in 2019.

Comentários / Comments (0)

Deixe um comentário / Leave a comment

Main menu

Recent posts

Recent comments

Tags

em-portugues (213) comp (147) prog (70) in-english (61) life (48) unix (38) pldesign (36) lang (32) random (28) about (28) mind (26) lisp (24) mundane (22) fenius (21) web (20) ramble (18) img (13) rant (12) hel (12) privacy (10) scheme (10) freedom (8) esperanto (7) music (7) lash (7) bash (7) academia (7) copyright (7) home (6) mestrado (6) shell (6) android (5) conlang (5) misc (5) emacs (5) latex (4) editor (4) etymology (4) php (4) worldly (4) book (4) politics (4) network (3) c (3) tour-de-scheme (3) security (3) kbd (3) film (3) wrong (3) cook (2) treta (2) poem (2) physics (2) x11 (2) audio (2) comic (2) lows (2) llvm (2) wm (2) philosophy (2) perl (1) wayland (1) ai (1) german (1) en-esperanto (1) golang (1) translation (1) kindle (1) pointless (1) old-chinese (1)

Elsewhere

Quod vide


Copyright © 2010-2024 Vítor De Araújo
O conteúdo deste blog, a menos que de outra forma especificado, pode ser utilizado segundo os termos da licença Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

Powered by Blognir.