Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
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Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
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Re: Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
#2Wow, I've been looking for something just like this. Absolutely fantastic!
Re: Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
#3It looks like the author of this (Stephen Diehl) is looking for a job in Boston. Maybe HN can help him out?
Re: Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
#4To pull this forward, the author is also the author of "Implementing a JIT Compiled Language in Haskell and LLVM" [0].
Re: Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
#5Now this is very interesting!
There are plenty of compiler writing tutorials for conservative, imperative programming languages with a straightforward static type system (like C).
I did study a little bit of compilers for functional languages from Simon Peyton-Jones' old book "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" [0]. It predates the Haskell programming language and uses a contemporary research language called Miranda as the target as well as the "host" language.
... which brings me to another topic: Monads. The SPJ book has a few chapters on implementing a Hindley-Milner -style type inference algorithm. It's written in Miranda without any Monads and uses a clever trick for coming up with unique temporary type names. There's an infinite list of integers [0..], which is "split" when traversing the syntax tree so that the left branch of the recursion tree gets the even numbers and the right branch gets the odd numbers.
The method works fine and is indeed very clever but try comparing that code to the same algorithm re-implemented (by me) with Monads (State and Error monads + transformer) [1]. The original algorithm is rather long and hard to follow (because lists of unique integers are passed to all functions).
I had a blast writing this algorithm, and I wanted to share it. It's been a few years since I last worked with it. It was my first non-trivial use of monads and I really like how it turned out in the end.
[0] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers... [1] https://github.com/rikusalminen/funfun/blob/master/FunFun/Ty...
Re: Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
#6As a sidenote, Stephen is also the author/maintainer of "What I Wish I Knew When I Was Learning Haskell"[0] which is a great resource both for those who are learning and for slightly advanced programmers.
Re: Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
#7Now this is very interesting! There are plenty of compiler writing tutorials for conservative, imperative programming languages with a straightforward static type system (like C). I did study a little bit of compilers for functional languages from Simon Peyton-Jones' old book "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" [0]. It predates the Haskell programming language and uses a contemporary research lan…
I think the online version of that book actually uses Haskell (but the text still refers to Miranda).
Re: Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
#8Now this is very interesting! There are plenty of compiler writing tutorials for conservative, imperative programming languages with a straightforward static type system (like C). I did study a little bit of compilers for functional languages from Simon Peyton-Jones' old book "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" [0]. It predates the Haskell programming language and uses a contemporary research lan…
Note that SPJ's book (1987) pre-dates Wadler's popularization of monads (1992) by a good 5 years, and Moggi's idea to use monads to describe different notions of computation by 4 years^1.
So they're missing for a reason.
1. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/crary/www/819-f09/Moggi91....
Re: Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
#9This looks really interesting! But I can't see any way to subscribe to book updates. A mailing list (my preferred means of subscribing to this kind of stuff these days) or an rss feed to get notified when new chapters are ready would be really handy.
Re: Write You a Haskell: Building a modern functional compiler from first principles
#10Now this is very interesting! There are plenty of compiler writing tutorials for conservative, imperative programming languages with a straightforward static type system (like C). I did study a little bit of compilers for functional languages from Simon Peyton-Jones' old book "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" [0]. It predates the Haskell programming language and uses a contemporary research lan…
Note that SPJ's book (1987) pre-dates Wadler's popularization of monads (1992) by a good 5 years, and Moggi's idea to use monads to describe different notions of computation by 4 years^1. So they're missing for a reason. 1. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/crary/www/819-f09/Moggi91....
Yes, I know that. There's a long and interesting history on the "round hole, square peg" problem of I/O, side effects and functional programming.
My sole intent was to emphasize, using a practical example, how neat and elegant monads can be at best.