I am currently trying to get some of this working in a library I call 'libalgae' in which I'm encoding algebraic data types and their eliminators (similar to ho

I am currently trying to get some of this working in a library I call 'libalgae' in which I'm encoding algebraic data types and their eliminators (similar to how Epigram works, like an induction principle for each datatype: This allows us to rule out non-terminating programs and ensure coverage of all constructors.) I'm not very much concerned with optimization, as I'd like to use this "DSL" as a bootstrapping language for a self-hosting programming language which provides the same in a more natural way. The way I've done it so far is seems to be working, and I've implemented standard types (their introduction and elimination rules) and few functions on them. The two main problems I've run into is memory leaking and portability. Since the constructors of an algebraic data type should return const data, it's a bit difficult to free them without violating the type system. I haven't decided yet if I'll end up violating the type system or just drop that const. I think the latter makes more sense, since we're trusting C as little as possible in the first palce. Everything actually might as well be done in void pointers but I think there's some value in using types where possible for documentation's sake. About portability. The main thing here that I ran into was that there's no real standard and portable way of doing closures or anonymous functions in C yet. Right now, what I'm doing is using nested functions, which works in GCC and clang, but I have no idea if they'd work in MSVC or any of the other compilers out there like pcc and lcc. OS X has blocks, but I figure if they're using gcc too, why not stick with nested functions. As far as I can tell, I won't have the problem of having nested functions returning before their parent does because of the eliminator model. The libCello (http://libcello.org/ http://libcello.org/) author has been able to successfully model typeclasses in C, so I will be picking that up as soon as I get around to it. I pushed some of the code to GitHub just now for this post: https://github.com/guerrilla/libalgae https://github.com/guerrilla/libalgae I'm glad to hear other people had the same idea. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know, as I wouldn't mind some collaboration on this.