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by jlouis 167 days ago
It's not that they can't. It's that it's a waste of time in most cases.

Compilers are moving targets because hardware changes. There's a considerable maintenance upkeep in a compiler.

So if you are interested in programming language semantics, you can opt to skip the compiler part. This lets you iterate language designs without the added baggage of translating said program to machine code.

You can also argue there's no need. If you present your programming language in operational semantics, then it's trivial to write that up as a prolog program and run it on a prolog interpreter. Then you can employ a partial evaluator, and the first Futamura-projection gives you a compiler. You can choose to host your prolog program in a programming language which already has access to a partial evaluator, and you are essentially done before you even started.
3 comments
ux266478 167 days ago
I'm someone who has used Prolog in the past, but this is the first time I'm learning of Futamura's work[1]. I knew it was great for building executable grammars, but I hadn't ever really tried to do so thus have absolutely no knowledge on the usual techniques. What an absolutely fascinating methodology, I can see exactly how it maps to Prolog.

[1] - https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/001/006/665/partial_evalua...

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randomNumber7 166 days ago
You could just target LLVM IR (or even simpler transpile to C). Should not take that much time for s.o. who knows what he is doing.
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juancn 167 days ago
But even a toy compiler would be useful to inspire someone else to pick up the concepts.

It doesn't have to be production grade, just as a communication tool.

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ux266478 167 days ago
It's important to note that not every research area ends up being a surface-language, and oftentimes research projects remain in-progress for a long time. There does exist a freely available research implementation of a 1ML interpreter (though slightly behind the language's formalization) offered by the author:

https://people.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/1ml/

The thing is that this is a research prototype, not a real compiler. It's not usable in the same degree as a language like SML or Haskell. There is a lot more work beyond a grammar that goes into creating a compiler for a high level language.

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