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Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE
- peter_d_sherman 5mo ago[dead]
- superdisk 5mo agoLooks cool and does aim to address some of the annoying warts in Pascal. Especially the memory model.
- samuell 5mo agoIt is a bit curious with the Mojo 1.0 beta coincidence, as Pascal was the other langauge with a highly readable and quite simple language combined with performant compiled code without GC. What it lacked was a modern compiler and stack. There is FreePascal for sure, and Lazarus is impressive, but it for sure has its baggage.
- vintagedave 5mo agoYeah, Python and Pascal have always felt like they share similar vibes, despite being massively different languages. (Ease of writing, ease of reading, good inbuilts, etc.) Mojo feels like a clean take on similar goals... it's essentially a cleaner Python.
- jibal 5mo agoMojo is faster than Python but certainly not cleaner.
- vintagedave 5mo agoCan you share more? I haven't actually used Mojo, I've just read about it, so I'm going on vibes (not AI ones :D) here. I'd love to hear your opinion.
- jibal 5mo agoMojo has both Python's def and its own fn -- two different flavors of functions. That alone isn't "cleaner". fn is there for high performance -- it's like Rust added to Python. Mojo is still missing Python functionality because it's early in development, so by that measure it's also not a "cleaner Python" ... and the parts that will never be added are because of performance, not cleanliness. Mojo has never been advertised as a cleaner Python so I don't know what vibes you're going on. This might be helpful: https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/python-to-mojo/ https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/python-to-mojo/
- tomekw 5mo agoThat’s so great! Thank you! I wish something like this existed for Ada :)
- magicalhippo 5mo agoLooks interesting. As someone who's been using Pascal since Turbo Pascal 6, and use Delphi daily at work, I'm not sure I quite get the "COM-style interface GUID" objection. What exactly about it is complex, and how do you implement Supports() without it?
- vintagedave 5mo agoNot the OP, but I can answer with an objection to COM-style GUIDs myself. Delphi's interfaces are heavily based around COM, and so you need GUIDs, ARC, etc. But interfaces as a concept don't require the COM backend. If you want your code to be cleanly separated, but don't want to split ownership/management models* (create/free vs ARC), and have no need for an interface and type identity to be managed outside your code and process (ie no COM), then interfaces that are not tied to ARC, and not tied to COM, give the clean code benefit without the baggage. [*] People work around this by implementing interfaces from a base class with no-op AddRef/Release methods. But this kinda shows the problem: why is that necessary? I work with Oxygene which is another modern Pascal -- quite a few new Pascals have popped up recently, I get the sense there's a real desire for something new! Our interfaces can be 'clean' and we support soft interfaces, too.
- magicalhippo 5mo agoBut you don't need to specify a GUID for an interface in Delphi, and Blaise uses ARC for both objects and interfaces.
- vintagedave 5mo agoTrue! But here at least Blaise is consistent. It’s not mixing models. My real wish for Pascal interfaces is that they are pure. Some of that is not bringing in COM stuff (including recounting) because I think memory management is or should be different to interface-based clean coding. Another: In Delphi if you define a property in an interface, you have to bring in the getter and setter too. And that makes them implicitly public / visible (even if the implementing class declares them as private.) And they must be methods, there’s no way to say “read, but I don’t care how” (where Delphi can normally read fields too.) In other words, the semantic of “I want a property with read access” causes the interface contract to define the implementation, including making public the normally private / internal backing. Whereas what I really want is to declare “property Foo: Integer read;” and the interface requires that is satisfied, but not how. In other words, interfaces are pure - they don’t bring in extra baggage. You can do that in Oxygene.
- dvh 5mo agoFor me the only reason to use pascal is GUI apps but this doesn't have it.
- graemep 5mo agoI have not used Pascal, but things that appeal to me (other than GUI apps) are that it seems simple to learn, and is readable, fast and compiles fast. What languages would be better in these ways?
- crq-yml 5mo agoForth could make a case for "faster" in compilation, at least, since it's aggressively machine-level(in a traditional assembly-up bootstrapped system) but blends a mix of interpreted and compiled. Readable and fast in the real-world cases, OTOH, is a matter of taste and engineering practice. I'm doing hobby Forth and it's a blast - it starts off as a crude load-and-store Fortran-like language, and gradually evolves as you stumble into new idioms. If I had to work with a team, I would probably yearn for a Pascal where some bureaucratic boundaries exist on what can be done.
- graemep 5mo agoThanks, that sounds interesting. I learned a tiny bit for Forth for fun a long time ago but no one else seems to use it and it does not seem to have much of an ecosystem so it looks like its only for niche hobby projects? What sort of projects do you use it for?
- graemeg 5mo agofpGUI Toolkit will be made to work with Blaise. [1] Homepage (terrible looking): https://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ https://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ [2] Github repo: https://github.com/graemeg/fpGUI/ https://github.com/graemeg/fpGUI/ The Discussion area has some interesting conversations and screenshots.
- ptrott2017 5mo agoYou can use Lazarus from a C interface - via liblcl. There are bindings for Go and Nim that use this method. Given the QBE backend, this may be one possible route for Blaise but needs investigation.
- HexDecOctBin 5mo agoDoes this support declaring variables anywhere (as opposed to only in the beginning of a function)? That was my primary complaint when using Lazarus.
- pjmlp 5mo agoDelphi has allowed this for quite some time.
- vintagedave 5mo agoYes - OP, you can do this via inline vars and consts: begin var foo : string := 'hello'; const c : integer = 5; var bar := GetBar(); // type inference even // and in blocks: for var i := low(x) to high(x) do... end;
- HexDecOctBin 5mo agoYeah, but then I'll have to deal with Embarcadero.
- ausare 5mo ago“ The Object Pascal ecosystem has two options: Embarcadero Delphi (proprietary, Windows-first) and Free Pascal…” This part isn’t true, for many years now we’ve also had Oxygene - https://www.remobjects.com/elements/oxygene/ https://www.remobjects.com/elements/oxygene/ (also proprietary)
- pjmlp 5mo agoWhich has had a strange relationship with Delphi, for a while they were responsible for Delphi.NET.
- lpcvoid 5mo agoFrom somebody that used to live in the Delphi world for about a decade: very nice!
- zx8080 5mo agoSorry, I don't trust a compiler project that's done in 3 weeks (I've checked the repo commits history). Downvote this if you want.
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- graemeg 5mo agoEvery new project starts at Day 1. :-)
- satnhak 5mo agoThat's exactly what I was thinking.
- skeeter2020 5mo agois this done? from what I read it's not really (i.e. community) started. Go a bit deeper than the commit history and look at the person behind the project. As we enter the AI developer winter the personal reputation of the author is going to become incredibly critical IMO.
- zx8080 5mo agoThere's no any ai winter on the horizon. Yet.
- ptrott2017 5mo agoValid concern which should not be downvoted. For some this will be too early to garner interest or confidence. For others, especially those interested in the Pascal language family or building a compiled language with QBE, there is a lot of things in this project that justify taking a close look. (Not least of all, Graeme's proven track record in the Pascal community). Glad the project is getting some deserved attention and looking forward to seeing how it evolves.
- 5mo ago
- anthk 5mo agoCan this compile these games? https://jxself.org/git/supernova.git https://jxself.org/git/supernova.git https://jxself.org/git/beyond-the-titanic.git https://jxself.org/git/beyond-the-titanic.git Ok, there's no way to bootstrap it without FPC... can the compiler compile itself?
- graemeg 5mo agoEvery new compiler needs to be bootstrapped by something - unless you head straight into Assembly Language from day1 - but I'm not that crazy! Yes, Blaise reached self-hosting after just 7 days. Meaning it could compile itself, and was byte-for-byte identical to the bootstrapped version. The language was absolutely barebones, but that's not the goal at that stage. The first (FPC) compiled binary is called the Stage 1 binary. That binary then compiles the compiler code to make a Stage 2 binary (a read Blaise compiler binary). Then Stage 2 compiles the compiler code again to make a Stage 3 binary. Self-hosting is when the stage-2 binary and stage-3 binaries are byte-for-byte identical. Blaise has already achieved that. I'm currently actively working on removing the FPC and GCC bootstrap requirements. After which Blaise would become it's own bootstrap compiler.
- jasperry 5mo agoExcited to see another project targeting the QBE back end, from what I can tell it's a great lightweight alternative to LLVM.
- graemeg 5mo agoYes it has been fantastic to work with QBE so far. It's way simpler than LLVM, giving you about 70% of the LLVM performance, for 10% of the effort. :) Only downside is Windows support.
- paddim8 5mo agoUnfortunately the QBE code is really strange so if you need to make some changes yourself it probably won't be very fun
- jasperry 5mo agoThat's good to know. Can you point to an example?
- ziotom78 5mo agoInitially, I was skeptical and thought that this is the millionth vibe-coded project that will die once the author gets bored. However, when I checked who the author is, I found he is is Graeme Geldenhuys, the author of the fpGUI library [1]. He surely has a lot of experience with FreePascal and the Pascal language, and in these years he has proven to be a committed worker (fpGUI exists since 2010!). So, this project seems to start on good grounds! I really hope it will gain traction, as I have often wondered myself why somebody would not create a “clean” Pascal compiler from scratch with no legacy cruft and good defaults (e.g., UTF-8 strings, inline variable declaration). [1]: https://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ https://fpgui.sourceforge.net/
- graemeg 5mo agoThank you. fpGUI is 20 years old this year! :-D
- mark_l_watson 5mo agoThat looks cool. If they support binary releases on macOS Apple Silicon I will try it out. I wrote one major project in UCSD Pascal on Apple II 45 years ago: my Honnibo Warrior Go Playing program. For its time, a fantastic dev environment.
- anthk 5mo agoWill you port it to 32 bit? There's already a QBE port for it.
- crq-yml 5mo agoI'm actually really happy to see a fresh "just Pascal", and one that is aiming for a slim bootstrap at that.
- musicale 5mo agoBut no with statement. :( I find with-style code so convenient that I recreate it in other languages (auto _=&foo; ...)
- rlawson 5mo agoWhat a great option to have! All of the good parts of Pascal and non of the baggage