Maru - a tiny self-hosting lisp dialect

Scott McKay swmckay at gmail.com
Mon Oct 5 12:05:01 UTC 2020


Nice work. It's worth the extra length in order to buy correctness and
portability
that you yourself don't have to maintain.

Lisp is the simplest language to bootstrap for sure. Would be nice to get
everything
out of the bootstrapper that isn't the core Lisp language. Of course, it's
probably worth
having handcrafted LLVM code for the primitives that greatly affect
performance.

—S


On Mon, Oct 5, 2020 at 7:40 AM Attila Lendvai <attila at lendvai.name> wrote:

> How hard would it be to do this in LLVM, I wonder?
>>
>
> i've done that already, and with LLVM the self-hosting is about 3000 kLoC,
> although i'm looking into new features that would hopefully allow
> shrinking/simplifying the codebase back a little. mostly by separating the
> code that is strictly needed for the bootstrap process from the
> ever-growing set up libs and utils that get added for other tests and
> actual uses of the language.
>
> most of the extra lines are needed because the LLVM IR has a strict type
> system that had to be accommodated when compiling e.g. FFI calls and such.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/pro/attachments/20201005/3447e6f5/attachment.htm>


More information about the pro mailing list