ltta

3 ms·

1.
by ltta 12y ago
Totally agree, ML-style languages are great for writing compilers.
2.
by ltta 12y ago
I tried to get into various CAD applications at various points in time and never managed to "get it". It was mostly about the interface, you just have to invest a lot of time (more than I was willing to spend) to get even remotely
3.
by ltta 12y ago
OpenSCAD is decently reliable up to a certain amount of objects/vertices. Once I reach a limit rendering becomes too slow and sometimes makes OpenSCAD crash. What I ended up doing is to model individual parts (which is a good idea anyw
4.
by ltta 12y ago
Speaking of SSA and optimizations, I just remembered that Andy Wingo (core contributor to Guile scheme) has a treasure trove of great articles, e.g. a fun intro to SSA [1] or CPS as used in Guile [2]. His blog is totally worth just browsing
5.
by ltta 12y ago
Much of the frontend is pretty much the same: parsing, semantic analysis, type checking. LLLVM mostly comes into play when generating the code. Instead of generating assembbler or opcodes directly, you call into LLVM to create data structur
6.
by ltta 12y ago
If you are interested in a printed version of a great beginner's compiler book, I can highly recommend Andrew W. Appel's "Modern Compiler in C". There are also versions of the book written for SML or Java. I have read an
7.
by ltta 12y ago
This is not necessarily a language-level decision (except for GC, it helps in this case spread out the deallocations when using incremental GC). You just have to be aware what happens in the destructor when you manually free an object. Libr
8.
by ltta 12y ago
Modern architectures really necessitate a good understanding of the instruction pipeline and caches to squeeze out the best performance. If I remember correctly, Python's hashtables are initialized with 8 buckets that are linearly sear
9.
by ltta 12y ago
And also check out this paper comparing reference counting and GC, and the accompanying discussion on LtU. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2552 (Although I think the paper has problems and bias)
10.
by ltta 12y ago
As far as I know ARC (like manual memory managenent) can lead to release cascades that can also cause application delays in games eg. Something you have to watch for. Malloc() and free() and equivalents do quite a bit of work under the hood
11.
by ltta 12y ago
Smalltalk is a little shrewd in some ways as outlined here. Self has already been mentioned as a great alternative (and the related papers are amazing IMO and influence most modern JITs). But there are some other really interesting alternat
12.
by ltta 12y ago
Java probably won because of its C-inspired syntax. At that point smalltalk was falling behind and C++ started to take off. To me Java was always meant as a better C++. At least that is my guess. A lot of the people behind Self went on to w