Self Hosting

[sirinath]

At least by version 1.0 please target 100% self hosting.

[magnus-madsen]

What do you mean by self-hosting? Do you mean that the generated code should depend on the compiler- because we are slowly working on that.

[sirinath]

This is:

• Self-hosting
• Meta-circular evaluator

Also it might be worth while perusing Homoiconicity with syntactic meta programming defining the language and compilation done with term/graph rewriting. Non Lisp/Scheme language like Julia has Homoiconicity.

The applications of the above is:

• new versions of the language can be very quickly defined
• experimentation can be easily done
• compilation and optimisation would be very succinct
• optimisation can be library defined for special cases
• new optimisations can be easily added
• compilation will be as parallel as hardware allows an fast as possible

To get the above benefits you would need:

• Homoiconicity for ease of program transformation and code generation,
• Term/Graph Rewriting and abstract reduction system for optimisation and AST+code generation,
• Higher-order abstract syntax to work with syntax and intermediate representations.
• Built in Text and Binary Parser Library,
• Compile time Meta-circular evaluator with Staging for partial evaluation.
• Meta programming / macros to generate code and work with syntax.
• Also Join Calculus + Transactional Events for parallelisation of code especially of rewriting rules to parallelise the compilation and optimisation pipeline.

These can be used by the language users also, e.g. parses can be used for parsing data files, protocols, etc. and parallelisation library can be used to parallelise programs and staging can be used for compile time reduction.

[magnus-madsen]

We will probably rewrite Flix in Flix at some point, but it is not a priority right now.