On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Timothy Baldridge <tbaldri...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> I've been debating on working on a native Clojure > > I've also been debating this for over two years now,y but I keep > coming back to the same problems over and over again: > > 1) A from-scratch native Clojure either needs to be just a compiler > (as this project is), or you're going to need a decent GC, JIT and > object system
You need a decent GC and object system in either case. > 2) The Boehm GC is easy to use, but it's not fast or accurate. The > JVMs can implement generational concurrent compacting GCs (and do > depending on your implementation). These are all very useful features, > and things that Boehm doesn't support. In addition, Boehm isn't > accurate, so memory leaks can still occur. Boehm is just a starting point to get things off the ground. We'll eventually have a precise, generational GC as well. In particular, there is one I have a bit of experience with: http://schani.wordpress.com/tag/sgen/ > 3) Unless you plan on staying strictly AOT, and igoring the REPL, then > we're going to need a JIT, that's not exactly something you can hack > together in an afternoon I don't follow. > 4) Arithmetic must auto-unbox or it will be quite slow. This also > requires a JIT. No. JITs can help there in some ways, with run-time feedback optimizations, but type declarations and some analysis also go a long way. > 5) Clojure is made up of hundreds of single line functions, a JIT > should be able to inline this, one more reason why its needed Static compilers can also inline. Again, JITs can do more, but this is not a show-stopper by a long shot. > All these reasons have brought me to the conclusion that the simplest > way to get all this, is to base a native version of Clojure on PyPy. > No, I didn't say write it in Python and have it run on the Python VM. > PyPy is technically speaking a "language agnostic JIT generator > written in Python". We already have two first class JITting Clojure implementations. This is a different project. Mark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
