(author here) Thanks for nicely summarizing the project! I didn't know about fftw, but another nice analogy is TeX by Donald Knuth! TeX is actually written in

(author here) Thanks for nicely summarizing the project! I didn't know about fftw, but another nice analogy is TeX by Donald Knuth! TeX is actually written in WEB / a subset of Pascal (H-Pascal I think), and then translated to C. That is, it's NOT typically compiled with a Pascal compiler (I wonder if anyone even maintains those?). This came up a few times on Hacker News and I got some interesting details. I wrote yesterday that I want to hire a Compiler Engineer to help with the C++ translation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605304 It's already half done, passing ~1100 of 1950 spec tests, so I believe it's very feasible. But it needs someone who can concentrate on it full time. I might as well post the draft of the "job listing" to get people thinking about this. I think the challenge is finding the right person rather than funding it (I'm applying for funding now) https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compiler-Engineer-Job https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compiler-Engineer-Job (rough draft, you may see polished versions of this later) One sentence description: write an ~10K line translator for statically typed Python, and a ~5K line C++ runtime, and get a free shell out of it! (over 5 years of painstaking work on the semantics!) The input is ~36K lines of Python the output is ~100K lines of C++. This is a very doable project for an experienced compiler engineer. :) So if anyone knows a good candidate, send them my way at andy@oilshell.org. ---- Also, I (virtually) attended the panel where this paper originated: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/06/hotos-shell-panel.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/06/hotos-shell-panel.html It was basically a call for researchers, hence lesser focus on existing and new implementations. I think it's good to publish future-facing ideas (almost all of which I've read), whereas Oil is a lot of engineering work!