"we cannot create assembly code output from Meta II, as assemblers don’t allow for the inlining of strings." This is actually not a major limitation. We've jus

"we cannot create assembly code output from Meta II, as assemblers don’t allow for the inlining of strings." This is actually not a major limitation. We've just been blinkered by decades of one kind of notion for "Assembler". It's actually quite easy to create a syntax atop machine code (and implemented in machine code) that provides string literals. As evidence: I've done it. Here's the pass in my 'assembler' that implements string literals: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/dquotes.subx.html http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/dquotes.subx.html. That page is 1925 lines long, but take out the comments and unit tests and there's only 383 lines of code (336 x86 instructions). Including library functions elsewhere (also built in machine code) the resulting binary is 6.5KB large. There's an example up top that I'll reproduce here: $ cat x == code ab "cd ef"/imm32 $ cat x | apps/dquotes == code ab __string1/imm32 == data __string1: 5/imm32/length 0x63/c 0x64/d 0x20/ 0x65/e 0x66/f All it's doing is moving string literals to the data segment and replacing their original location with the label they were moved to. Currently there's zero optimization; if you refer to "foo" 3 times you get 3 separate literals in your binary and data segment. More details on the syntax: http://akkartik.name/post/mu-2019-1 http://akkartik.name/post/mu-2019-1. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268252.