[bitc-dev] BitC, Irken, CPS

[Sam Rushing]

Hello All!

I recently posted on LtU asking for help with a type inference question,
and was directed here to talk about BitC.

First I should say I was pleasantly surprised to discover BitC - the
overlap with my own project was a bit shocking, in a good way.  It's
nice to see that others are thinking in the same 'space' that I do,
makes it less lonely.  Last night I read the "Origins of BitC" paper,
and was loudly agreeing with just about every point made in there.

BitC appears to be muuuuch further along than I am, but it also seems to
have a pretty big footprint.  Whereas BitC is several MB of code, the
Irken tarball is a piddling 150KB of Python code.  It would be wrong to
call it more than a 'prototype' by comparison. 8^)

I've been trying to get BitC running... first I made the mistake of
trying it on osx/ppc (something related to gc has not been ported?) then
tried freebsd/x86 - some kind of bison problem.

Ok, now to my issue with the C stack.  Am I correct in thinking that
BitC generates separate C functions and uses the C calling convention? 
As I said in my other post to LtU, I want to avoid the big disconnect
between the high-level and low-level languages.  My plan is to implement
call/cc in the low-level language and use it in both levels.

Things I'd like to have in both languages: 

  lightweight threads
  continuations
  generators
  exceptions
  ability to dump and load an image
  marshalling a continuation, maybe sending it to another machine
  massive scalability (and thus a small footprint per 'thread')

My target applications are things like network servers
(http/smtp/dns/etc) and possibly things like servers for MMO's.

-Sam