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0 pointsevincarofautumn13y ago0 comments

I have experimented a little bit with D, and really like some of the things in the standard library, but Haskell is already serving as my replacement for C++. D is a viable alternative to C++ for most purposes, though.

I’m actually working on a compiler for a high-performance functional language, to serve in those cases when I would want to go back to C++…

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mappu13y ago

I'm working on-and-off on something similar, would you excuse a few questions?

Is it statically typed? Do you have ADT support and/or an object system? GC / refcounting or manual memory management?

How are you implementing bind() and currying in a compiler? I'm targeting x86 and my approach is to make little stubs on the heap that push a single parameter, then i can throw them around as ordinary function pointers (lambda lifting every single parameter rather than looking up things through environment pointers at runtime). The problem with this is that i end up with a huge amount of small fixed-size objects on the heap, which is a little less than ideal but at least i can write a special allocator for that case.

EDIT: Upon a little background reading (and your illuminating february blog post on concatenative languages) i realise you're probably referring to Kitten, in which case i'm not sure any of my current questions are remotely applicable.

evincarofautumnOP13y ago

I am moving from dynamic to static typing. Unfortunately the `compose` primitive has a rank-2 type in the general case, so you need explicit type annotations for many higher-order functions. I am supporting ADTs, which are basically identical to quotations under the hood. There will be an object system in the standard library once I figure out a good object model. Memory management is done through plain old refcounting. Some programs may benefit from waiting for the next push before deallocating popped values, but I have yet to profile to find out.

As you may have realised, currying doesn’t really apply to concatenative languages because they lack application. The analogue of partial application is deferred composition, i.e., just concatenating quotations:

    [1] [+] compose  [1 +]  =

I’ve been working on the language actively, but haven’t pushed code lately. Do watch the repo[1] if you’re interested, though, and link me to yours. I also think I know you from #esoteric or something? My memory sucks and I haven’t been on there lately.

[1] https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten

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