[bitc-dev] BitC is interesting

[Donnie Jones]

Dr. Shapiro,

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 3:00 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <shap at eros-os.com>wrote:

> Jonathan:
>
> Thanks for your comments. Some responses.
>
> On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:54 PM, Jonathan Hseu <vomjom at vomjom.net> wrote:
>
>> I really think compiling to LLVM bytecode is the right way to go.  The
>> homepage mentions that LLVM work began in March, but the source code doesn't
>> seem to use it at all.  Is it still your intention to use LLVM?
>
>
> LLVM is a very impressive bit of infrastructure, but we got distracted by
> some more important issues. We'll get back to LLVM.
>
> Pragmatically, though, I have two concerns with LLVM that I don't know how
> to address:
>
>    1. It's written in an unsafe language, and therefore is very difficult
>    to include in a BitC runtime.
>    2. It is starting to look like we need our own optimization
>    infrastructure in order to efficiently avoid JIT compilation.
>
> Neither of these is insurmountable, and we may find solutions to both as we
> dig into LLVM more seriously.
>

Maybe C-- (C minus minus) can provide the flexibility you need?
http://www.cminusminus.org/

"C-- has a machine-level type
system<http://www.cminusminus.org/faq.html#notypes>,
so you don't have to shoehorn your favorite high-level language into a
high-level data model that doesn't fit"
http://www.cminusminus.org/faq.html#notypes


>
> One thing that clang does really well is proper error messages.  This is
>> also, to me, one of the main attractive properties of python (although the
>> errors are at runtime).  g++, on the other hand, has completely
>> incomprehensible error messages if you make a mistake with anything that
>> uses templates.  In my opinion, it would be a good move to make error
>> messages a focus early on.
>
>
> BitC actually does a very good job with some kinds of error messages that
> are well known to be hard, and we are pretty good at identifying locations
> of errors precisely. The messages themselves could certainly use
> improvement, and we need to do some work on error recovery in the parser.
> None of that is as important as getting a first working compiler into the
> field.
>

I am also glad to hear that BitC will do a very good job with error
messages.

Thanks.
__
Donnie
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