Graal and Truffle could accelerate programming language design

Post by rev_null » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 1:15 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #17

There's actually a fairly long history of cross-language VMs, with various degrees of success. What usually happens is that they work fine for languages that look, semantically, basically like the native language on the VM. So LLVM works well as long as your language is mostly like C (C, C++, Objective-C, Rust, Swift). Parrot works if you language is mostly like Perl 6 (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby). .NET works if your la…

Post by kaeluka » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 2:32 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 smallnamespace » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 4:33 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #175

smallnamespace wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to determine which facts? Why would that group not use that to their advantage, instead of to the benefit of everyone? > The majority never picks the best and markets do not optimize as much as some people think. Whether it's movies, arts, books, music, politicians, keyboards or programming languages, the most popular choices are practically never the best ones. The question is not whether the market picks t…

> The question is not whether the market picks the optimal outcome, but whether a committee of experts would do better. The experience of central planning within the Warsaw Pact should hint at the answer... The experience of the entire Internet seems to suggest a different answer, so it's not that central planning is always bad. Note that the best, most reliable, most stable parts of the Internet were invented and co…

Post by grashalm » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

iso-8859-1 wrote: post #188

grashalm wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite outdated. here is an overview of Graal/Truffle papers and tutorials: https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Publications+and...

Is this one less outdated? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJY96_6Y3a4

Post by cygx » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 8:34 PM UTC

rev_null wrote: post #191

nostrademons wrote: post #17

There's actually a fairly long history of cross-language VMs, with various degrees of success. What usually happens is that they work fine for languages that look, semantically, basically like the native language on the VM. So LLVM works well as long as your language is mostly like C (C, C++, Objective-C, Rust, Swift). Parrot works if you language is mostly like Perl 6 (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby). .NET works if your la…

As a specific example, Graal is built on the JVM. I'd be interested to see if they have support for languages that require tail call optimization (haskell, scheme) as the JVM cannot work with TCO languages.