GRIN backend - Githubissues

hmac / kite

A Haskell-like language for scripting and web apps

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License

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GRIN backend #2

Closed hmac closed 2 years ago

hmac commented 4 years ago

GRIN is an ideal backend for Lam, as it's designed for functional languages that utilise graph reduction. Lam is strict rather than lazy, but we should still get a massive benefit from this.

Native code generation via LLVM
Support for multiple architectures (x86, ARM, WASM etc.)
Optimisation, both of performance and code size

What we need to do (at a high level):

Compile typed Lam code to a representation compatible with GRIN. We need to check exactly what this is, but I believe it's a combination of:
- Fully lambda-lifted
- Single namespace
- All compound expressions bound in lets
- All pattern matching is simple case expressions
- Get rid of records, somehow
Plug this output into GRIN
Figure out how to coordinate it so we get same output from it.

Open questions

How will we integrate this with Lam packages? GRIN will generate executable binaries - do we distribute packages purely at source level and ignore this until we're generating an end-user executable?

hmac commented 2 years ago

Instead of GRIN, the approach we're aiming for at the moment is to compile Kite to a custom instruction set for the Kite VM, which will interpret it. This instruction set is quite low level, and includes reference counting operations. It should be possible to compile it to LLVM bytecode or webassembly in the future. Work on this is in the branch kitecore.