pikelet-lang / pikelet

A friendly little systems language with first-class types. Very WIP! 🚧 🚧 🚧
https://pikelet-lang.github.io/pikelet/
Apache License 2.0
608 stars 26 forks source link

Refactor the compiler to use visitors #75

Open brendanzab opened 6 years ago

brendanzab commented 6 years ago

I poke fun at expression parser/evaluator written in OO style, because really the visitor pattern is just asking for it. But I have a weird, almost morbid fondness for such things written in plain old ANSI C. It’s complicated between me and C don’t ask me about it I’m not ready

Drn’t Tran Ma 🦖

At the moment we create lots of intermediate data structures between the stages in the compiler, and it would be nice to cut that down!

Using the visitor pattern might make things more efficient by allowing us to fuse various traversals into single passes. Ultimately it might even be a good idea (or even necessary) to push the visitor abstraction back to the nameless library as well. The challenge would be to continue to maintain a nice, readable codebase in the process.

Resources

brendanzab commented 6 years ago

Just made a repo with some visitor stuff from the Zero-Overhead blog post: brendanzab/rust-visitors.

brendanzab commented 6 years ago

I also have a (currently broken) branch with some experiments at https://github.com/pikelet-lang/pikelet/tree/visitors

brendanzab commented 6 years ago

One concern is that Moniker (the name-binding library we use) is currently designed in a way that might make this hard to get much value out of. It would be neat to see if we could move Moniker to a model that more looks like what is described in Visitors Unchained and implemented in alphaLib.