[nickpsecurity]

Luu's claims made me hold off on pushing people to contribute to Julia as I waited for corroboration (or refutation) of them. I appreciate you linking to that very fair post that replies to it. The contrast between how the two of your present your claims adds credibility to yours. I also got a great laugh out of part about one guy that barely speaks English using the project as a personal Stackoverflow. A problem I'd have not anticipated starting a language/compiler project haha.

Curious, are you all still coding the internals of the compiler in femtolisp, is most of it written in Julia indirectly relying on that, or no LISP now? A barrier to entry question basically.

[StefanKarpinski]

The parser and some lowering passes are still written in femtolisp. There has been some discussion of switching to the native JuliaParser package [1]. However, JuliaParser doesn't implement the fairly tricky lowering passes that the femtolisp parser does. I personally would prefer to have the parser in Julia, but at this point the most pressing issue with parsing and lowering is speed – so it's possible that the parsing and lowering will be converted to C instead.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/JuliaParser.jl

[nickpsecurity]

Thanks for the update. Decent plan. An alternative would be to code it in SPARK Ada for speed and correctness. Has side benefit that each component done that way won't be touched by halfassed developers because they lack the will to learn it. Not quick n dirty enough for them. ;)

[vanderZwan]

> I personally would prefer to have the parser in Julia, but at this point the most pressing issue with parsing and lowering is speed – so it's possible that the parsing and lowering will be converted to C instead.

But isn't Julia supposed to be fast? ;)

[nickpsecurity]

And this is just a parser. Nothing too fancy. Analysis should be able to produce some efficient code for one.