Hacking Notes

These are prefixed with "zz" so they sort at the bottom of the pages list.

• zzz-notes: OO methods, type classes, etc
• zz-note: assembler bug on OS X
• zz-note: bootstrapping manually
• zz-note: distributing irken output
• zz note: memory size
• zz-note: self brain surgery
• zz-note: Garbage Collection
• zz-note: inference predicate type args
• zz-note: thread safety in runtime
• zz-note: type-checked embedded DSLs with quotations
• zz-note: exception improvements
• zz-note: better compiler errors

Dynamic Programming Gaps (things a LISPer would like)

• zz-note: important dynamic programming patterns
• zz-note: row optional polymorphic records
  • zz-node: heterogeneous lists of maps
  • zz-note: blurring row-typed records and JSON

Debugger Support

Three possible options for debugging:

1. Add debugging support to the VM, teach the compiler to output debugging symbols for bytecode
2. adding #line directives to the C output
3. add an LLVM backend, using LLVMs debugging directives

For 2/3, gdb can be extended to support language specific commands. See Google Go GDB extensions

• DWARF debugger symbol table format

• VS Code example debugger

• VS Code debugger protocol json schema

• Source Level Debugging with LLVM

• GDB/MI command interface

• Go and GDB

JIT VMs with Tail Call Optimization

CLR supports Tail Call Optimization.

LuaJIT supports Tail Call Optimization.

EcmaScript 6 requires proper tail call optimization. When TCO is implemented in Google V8, it could be an interesting backend target, because of its aggressive JIT, and support for Source Map, which is like debugging symbols for javascript transpilers.

• EcmaScript 6 compatibility chart

Future Directions

Research that might one day make it into Irken.

Garbage Collection

• Dijkstra, On-the-fly Garbage Collection, 1978
• Beltway: Getting Around Garbage Collection Gridlock, 2002
• C4: The Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector, 2011

Type Inference

• Set-Theoretic Types for Polymorphic Variants
• Polymorphism, Subtyping, and Type Inference in MLsub (see cool online demo)
• Smith, Polymorphic Type Inference for Languages with Overloading and Subtyping, 1991
  • is this the same as Type Classes? it sounds similar.
• Coercion as Homomorphism: Type Inference in a System with Subtyping and Overloading
• Coercion and Type Inference
• Type Reconstruction for Variable-Arity Procedures

Syntax

• Macros that Compose

Fun References

• Continuations by example: Exceptions, time-traveling search, generators, threads, and coroutines
• Lisp Curse by Rudolf Winestock
• Arguments against call/cc