Graal and Truffle could accelerate programming language design

Post by thomaswue » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 10:52 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #87

trishume wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly how Truffle's cross-language-interface works though. Instead of paying the high cost of conversion, data stays in its existing representation and it is the interface code that is recompiled to fit. An example is JRuby+Truffle where in its C extensions, pointers to Ruby objects act to the C code as if they are pointers to MRI data structures, but behind the scenes Graal compiles code that accesses them…

Interesting. What happens if the native memory layout doesn't support a feature that the extension code requires? For example, what if a JRuby+Truffle script calls into a C library, which allocates a struct and invokes a Ruby callback with it, which then wants to access the fields via reflection? C doesn't normally include type information with its structs, so how would the Ruby code know the memory layout of the obj…

Post by euyyn » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 11:03 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #61

ktRolster wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the industry were really striving for perfection, there would be no COBOL or BASIC, for instance. COBOL was a huge improvement at the time, an innovation in readability. BASIC is a good demonstration of why the platonic ideal language is wrong: it was designed for beginners (that's what the acronym stands for), and it did a reasonably good job at that. Beginners might be overwhelmed by OOP, multiple dispatch and a…

> COBOL was a huge improvement at the time, an innovation in readability. BASIC is a good demonstration of why the platonic ideal language is wrong: it was designed for beginners (that's what the acronym stands for), and it did a reasonably good job at that. Sure. But these systems were created from the ground up, every single time. Given a good foundation, which could be Lisp or something even better, you can whip u…

Post by bitmapbrother » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 11:08 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #142

bitmapbrother wrote: post #135

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You linked to an app that measures audio db levels. There are no low latency audio / music apps because windows phone isn't very good at it.

Or maybe because no one capable of writing such applications wants to target 1% market share? Sometimes being good at something isn't enough.

Post by jakub_h » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 11:15 PM UTC

dkarapetyan wrote: post #48

Doesn't RPython do all the same things? Also there are language workbenches ( http://www.languageworkbenches.net/ ) that allow one to get a bunch of things like IDE support and even basic compilers by properly expressing the language syntax and semantics. I agree there is a lot of interesting stuff going on here but lets not forget the prior art. Even OMeta I think already did a lot of these things way back when. Goi…

Post by pnathan » Tue, Jul 19, 2016, 11:45 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #119

pnathan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you could. You'd implement a program to take C code and emit an equivalent Lisp program (i.e., parse C and emit the tree into Lisp), then compile the Lisp program. The annotations and care the parser/semantic analysis code uses will provide the semantics of C. This will, however, not "play" like C without a great deal of work. You will be dragging an entire Lisp VM around and have to shake all of that out to act…

Why compile to lisp in the first place? Build a nanopass framework ( https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://... ) that acts on sexprs, and then emit the thing to a target of your choice. The advantage is that Lisp is really good at transforming sexprs, and macros make writing the infrastructure for that sort of compiler just that much easier.