4 ms·

I would rather that language designers get basic stuff like lexical scope right, before they care about performance. And LLVM is effectively a huge black box,

by pwpwp 16y ago

I would rather that language designers get basic stuff like lexical scope right, before they care about performance. And LLVM is effectively a huge black box, which I would caution any new language implementor against using. Sure, it may get you off the ground easier, but that's because you'll no longer be standing on the ground, you'll be standing on LLVM, a massive codebase you don't understand nothing about.

chc 16y ago
I agree entirely that language designers should focus on getting language issues like scopes right — and that's why I don't think they should waste their time reinventing codegen over and over again unless there's a compelling need for it. I mean, if you're just playing around and don't really want to make a language, fine. But wasting your time on details that aren't useful is the best way to make sure your project never amounts to anything.
- dedward 16y ago
  Speaking from the systems side of things - it's plainly obvious when you get a piece of software where the developers don't understand the system level at all - it's obvious they only understand things at an abstract, programming level, and don't really understand how their software is going to work in the real world. (The software will do what it's supposed to, and they may have implemented some fancy algorithms, but it will be a PITA to debug, PITA to install, PITA for every sysadmin who has to touch it, and PITA to try to design systems to support it.) The point of doing the low-level projects is to learn for yourself, not to literally create the best new language (but you never know.)
  - chc 16y ago
    Sure, like I said, if your goal is just idle curiosity and a desire to learn, that's fine. But it's kind of moving the goalposts to frame that as "creating a programming language" rather than "fruitlessly messing around with the science and techniques behind programming languages."
jules 16y ago
That's going to be the case regardless. If you compile to x86 machine code you're standing on a huge black box, but this time it's also an ugly, platform specific one. You think people should rather worry about getting lexical scope right, then why should they worry about the low level details? Sure, they have to have at least some idea about how it works on the lowest level, but they don't have to know all the stupid man-given details. Choosing LLVM over x86 assembly is good for performance and productivity. Performance with LLVM will be better unless you are going to spend an extraordinary amount of time to build better low level optimizations, register allocation and code generation than LLVM.

by pwpwp 16y ago

chc 16y ago

I agree entirely that language designers should focus on getting language issues like scopes right — and that's why I don't think they should waste their time reinventing codegen over and over again unless there's a compelling need for it. I mean, if you're just playing around and don't really want to make a language, fine. But wasting your time on details that aren't useful is the best way to make sure your project never amounts to anything.

dedward 16y ago
Speaking from the systems side of things - it's plainly obvious when you get a piece of software where the developers don't understand the system level at all - it's obvious they only understand things at an abstract, programming level, and don't really understand how their software is going to work in the real world. (The software will do what it's supposed to, and they may have implemented some fancy algorithms, but it will be a PITA to debug, PITA to install, PITA for every sysadmin who has to touch it, and PITA to try to design systems to support it.) The point of doing the low-level projects is to learn for yourself, not to literally create the best new language (but you never know.)
- chc 16y ago
  Sure, like I said, if your goal is just idle curiosity and a desire to learn, that's fine. But it's kind of moving the goalposts to frame that as "creating a programming language" rather than "fruitlessly messing around with the science and techniques behind programming languages."

jules 16y ago

That's going to be the case regardless. If you compile to x86 machine code you're standing on a huge black box, but this time it's also an ugly, platform specific one. You think people should rather worry about getting lexical scope right, then why should they worry about the low level details? Sure, they have to have at least some idea about how it works on the lowest level, but they don't have to know all the stupid man-given details. Choosing LLVM over x86 assembly is good for performance and productivity. Performance with LLVM will be better unless you are going to spend an extraordinary amount of time to build better low level optimizations, register allocation and code generation than LLVM.