Hey folks,
Hope you're doing well. I had to come out of my cave and travel for 5km
to get to a internet cafe in order to send this email :)).
Today I was reading about the principles of computing systems and all of
a suddent a light bulb popped up above my head and a wide smile on my
face. So basically I have to say that I've missed something really
simple but really important that I worked on it a lot as well and yet
surprising enough I forgot about. Till now, the plan was to create a
compiler for Serene in Rust or C++ and use that compiler to bootstrap a
self hosted compiler for Serene. But why can't we just create an
Interpreter for Serene to bootstrap the compiler ??? After all Serene is
a Lisp and it is in its nature to have an "interpreter" or a JIT.
Many languages are using the same approach (Specially Lisps) to
bootstrap the main compiler and eventually this bootstrap
compiler/interpreter is going to get outdated and replaced by the actual
compiler.
So, I think we have to shift our mindset from writting the compiler in
Rust and start creating the interpreter first. This way, will be closer
to have a working copy of Serene and closer to our far away goal. But in
order to implement this interpreter we have to think about couple of
important points:
1. Bootstrapping a compiler from the source should be easy. Many experts
say that a C/C++ compiler should be enough to bootstrap a new
language. So in this case Rust might not be the best tool for
us. Personally I think it's fine but we need to think deeper.
2. We need to come up with the spec of Serene (or a minimal version of
it) much earlier.
Please share your feed back and thoughts.
Cheers
Sameer
