Clojurians Log v2

@ben.sless yes, the compiler targets the VM. I have chosen this approach to get a constrained execution environment decoupled from the language itself. This way it should be easier to optimize for runtime performance eventually and, perhaps even use the bytecode as IR for another stage that would produce machine code. Your idea with piggybacking on Go compiler crossed my mind but I’m not anywhere near this yet. One could imagine being able to dump the VM state as a standalone executable that would also contain the interpreter (compiler+vm) that only kicks in for the dynamic stuff. This is possible with bytecode alone but who knows where it goes in the future 🙂

Thank you. Do you think the decision to generate bytecode will hamper you in the future if and when you want to emit machine code? You might end up having to write your own compiler from scratch, which is a shame because Golang has a really good compiler. How constrained would you say the execution environment is given Golang has managed memory? Do you manage memory yourself? Do you feel like going a bit in depth regarding the VM's architecture?

The current VM is stack based, just a for loop with a big switch inside. It’s utterly slow as it performs runtime checks on everything - this serves mainly as an aid in development - it’s easier to debug when something goes awry. I will slowly turn it towards unsafe when the compiler matures enough that we can trust it. One thing to note is that each call frame has its own instance of the VM and the call stack is handled by Go at the moment - this is slow but will avoid GIL.

performance is my last priority as I want to get a correct interpreter as the baseline before I go into any attempts at speeding this up

as for compiling to machine code - when I get to it I will probably rely on an existing optimizing compiler anyway. In this case it’s much easier to translate a set of well defined bytecode instructions than it is to go from sexp level to target language/IR

Maybe you can target LLVM and re-use that toolchain, eventually

@borkdude either this or, like @ben.sless suggested, use Go compiler as a library and generate some Go SSA on the fly 🙂