Re: Using luajit runtime for non-lua languages
- From: Tim Caswell <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: luajit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2013 20:23:41 -0600
On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 12:19 AM, Ben Johnson <benbjohnson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Tim-
>
> I talked to you a bit on Twitter about LLVM but I'll give you some more
> details here. I wrote an LLVM language that was similar to C but with some
> Java-style syntax and features for an open source database I wrote called
> Sky (http://skydb.io/). I used the LLVM C bindings instead of the
> standard C++ API. I eventually abandoned my language in favor of LuaJIT
> though because the complexity of writing a language and database at the
> same time is too much.
>
> Pros:
>
> - LLVM is well supported and, once you start to understand it, it just
> seems to work how you'd expect it to.
>
> - It's extremely fast. My language ran at C speeds. LuaJIT seems to run at
> about half the speed but that's pretty incredible considering how dynamic
> Lua is.
>
That's good to hear.
>
> - There are a lot of open source LLVM-based compilers (Clang, MacRuby,
> GHC, Emscripten) so you can compare LLVM IR (intermediate representation)
> and fix most problems you come across just by seeing how someone else did
> it.
>
>
> Cons:
>
> - It's big. When statically linked, it added about 10MB to my executable.
> In contrast, I'm now statically linking LuaJIT, LevelDB and 11K SLOC of my
> own C code and it's only 1.5MB. Maybe I did something wrong though because
> not all tools with LLVM dependencies are this large.
>
>
This may be a showstopper. I want something tiny.
> - Users need to have LLVM installed and it takes forever to compile. You
> can build binaries with LLVM linked in and distribute those. The Julia
> language does this (http://julialang.org/).
>
>
I dont want any external dependencies my users have to install.
> - You need to learn a whole new language (LLVM IR) to really know what
> you're doing. LLVM IR is fun after you understand it but I found it tough
> to wrap my head around it at first.
>
not a problem.
- LLDB (the debugger) doesn't support debugging of JIT code. This can make
> debugging a huge pain.
>
I'm used to not having a debugger
>
>
> I haven't used Parrot at all. You might also want to look at V8 (
> http://code.google.com/p/v8/) to see if you can bypass the lexer/parser.
> Or, if you're already compiling Jack to JavaScript then you could just pass
> that JavaScript directly to V8. It's incredibly fast.
>
>
>
> Ben Johnson
>
>
>
> On Feb 2, 2013, at 8:02 PM, Tim Caswell wrote:
>
> I'd rather not compile to lua because then I need a lua compiler in
> addition to a jack compiler. I guess the problem with generating my own
> luajit bytecode is I miss out on all the optimizations luajit does as it
> generates the bytecode from lua. I wonder if there is a way to give luajit
> IR code and have it optimize it and generate the final bytecode. I would
> still be skipping all the lua lexer/parser/code-gen steps and the lua
> standard library.
>
> If luajit isn't meant to be used this way, does anyone have experience or
> opinions on LLVM or Parrot? I'm also considering using those. I really
> like llvm because of it's many targets. But I don't quite understand how
> much runtime is required to compile llvm based languages. I don't want my
> users to have to install llvm to be able to compile Jack code.
>
> I do plan on porting my lexer/ parser/ code-gen code to Jack itself so it
> can be self-hosting. I just need a runtime bytecode format to use that I
> can bundle with the binary.
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 5:46 PM, Pierre-Yves Gérardy <pygy79@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 12:06 AM, Pierre-Yves Gérardy <pygy79@xxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > and the enforcement of the "density" of the list type.
>>
>>
>> Scratch that. Since the list and hash types are different, you could
>> use __newindex() to check efficiently whether the index is legal or
>> not. The same goes for tuples.
>>
>> Adding some more, if you were to take the compile to Lua route, you
>> could easily make a standalone binary by embedding the parser/compiler
>> as a boot script in a C header.
>>
>> for the generic loop, you could use the generic for loop, and wrap the
>> "in" clause in a dispatcher.
>>
>> function forDispatch (first, ...)
>> -- custom iterators?
>> if type(first) == "function" then return first, ... end
>> -- lists, tuples? and hashes
>> if type(first) == "table" then
>> local m = getmetatable(first)
>> if m == listMT then return ipairs(first)
>> else if ...
>> -- I guess you catch my drift...
>> end
>> error("Invalid type")
>> end
>>
>> -- Pierre-Yves
>>
>>
>
>
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