Christine Lemmer-Webber <cweb...@dustycloud.org> writes:
> A little blogpost this morning, not actual software, but software > desiderata: > https://dustycloud.org/blog/guile-steel-proposal/ > > I'd love to see something like the above happen. I'd love to help make > it happen. So this is more of a call to arms than anything else. > > Can we have a "systems lisp"? Can we do better than Rust? Let's put > some interesting things on that compiler tower of ours! Dear Christine, creating a Lisp-inspired systems programming language is indeed an interesting idea, I have also been thinking about something similar (though I wasn't thinking of tying it to Guile in any way). Your talk about propagators is also quite interesting, it may take me a lot of mental processing power to map them to "hey hardware, give me this many bytes on the stack"-style output, I ought to play around with them over the weekend. My own thoughts on a systems programming language primarily revolve around stealing interesting ideas from other projects: taking some notation from Cakelisp and Coalton, parts of the type system from Coalton and Rust, the memory management from Rust,... As I am a big fan of the GNU project I was thinking of targetting GCC's GENERIC as an initial compilation target, though I am aware that a lot of projects seem to prefer LLVM instead. Unfortunately it seems like GCC's documentation doesn't match up well against that of LLVM, so adding some advanced functionality may take some code reading (or putting GCC through GDB, that could be fun). The part of designing a language for systems programming I dread most is getting the predictability right. Being able to tell in advance what gets allocated on the stack, what on the heap, what gets freed when is very important. Of course manual memory management has been a major cause of bugs, so having the language manage it properly is of prime importance, which makes it hard to get the predictability right without hampering the ergonomics of the language. I am looking forward to reading your further thoughts as you start tinkering around with the idea. The Lisp revolution could use another stride forwards. Vale, - Tim
