The Hi Language

The Hi language is glue-like language implemented by me. At the moment, it is a mess. I have worked a long time on the compiler, but it is difficult to measure progress. I started this blog so I can keep better track of design decisions.

I got a stage zero compiler implemented in ML (ocaml). It reads Hi source and generates ML. I also had an evaluator in ML, and used to compile the AST to C. Unfortunately, recent development broke the evaluator (since I was more interested in compiling), and I broke the to C translator, since the generated C had hick-ups on interpreting large pieces of code. The ML target is slow also, but has a very clean implementation, so I'll stick with that.

The stage zero compiler at the moment accepts most of the language, but a few errors remain in the type checker. This is not a big problem, as I can compile the source without type checking it.

I also wrote the major portion of the stage one compiler in Hi which compiles to another variant of C. At the moment I am looking at how to build it such that it allows for incremental compilation. This is kind of a must, since the compiler, as compiled by stage zero, is too slow to handle a lot of input.

The stage one compiler performs more checks, and handles types correctly, except for a few corner cases.

The C runtime has some small, difficult to analyse, bugs.

So, the path forward. Fix the stage one compiler such that it allows for incremental compilation. Fix the C runtime.

I am moving the source-code into a version control system to keep track of it; I used tarballs until now. I chose git, for no better reason that I trust that Linus knows what he is doing. I find it strange to add half-baked code into a repository though.