Log 050815

So no programming today. Family business, which was a good idea since I am easily mentally worn-out these days. But it remains in my mind.

So, a few random thoughts:

Trading robustness for speed. I rewrite everything to an eager manner of rewriting combinators to avoid stack overflows. I am not sure people willing to use the language will appreciate the, rather enormous, cost in running speed. If I am going to compile to LLVM, or some other JIT since LLVM seems to have performance problems, it becomes 'trivial' to encode to standard function calls. Moreover, a rather large number of optimizations would become feasible, or could easily be done by the LLVM compiler.

But you sacrifice robustness, and after a myriad of stack overflows bootstrapping in OCaml I don't want to go back.

As a side note, I also figured out how to handle closures in that scenario. The function knows when to reduce or push a closure so that's trivial. Exception handling is also enabled by default in the modern processor ABIs so I figure I don't even need to do difficult stuff for that.

Who will ever use this language? This is really a difficult question. FP enthusiasts? They already have a large number of compilers to chose from. SML or Haskell probably will gobble all of them up. I thought numeric computing for a moment, but those favor simple algorithmic languages. I read up on Julia, these programmers think fundamentally different than functional programmers and want optimal speed. I thought about web servers, which may be a target for some people, in which case I need to think about handling threads and shared state. Then I thought that it might be nice to write simple robust GUI applications; but who would choose my language over Python? I need a convincing use case. Some place where you need ridiculously robust software?

But I still like the language.

Compiling to Object files and C/C++ integration. Given a JIT compiling to .o files is automated for you, which is something I really want. But how the hell does the linker know about namespaces? Is there some name mangling going on I don't know about? Answer here, it seems.