Hacker News with Generative AI: Compiler Design

Obvious things C should do (digitalmars.com)
Standard C undergoes regular improvements, now at C23. But there are baffling things that have not been fixed at all. The Dlang community embedded a C compiler in the D programming language compiler so it could compile C. This C compiler (aka ImportC) was built from scratch. It provided the opportunity to use modern compiler technology to fix those shortcomings. Why doesn’t Standard C fix them?

Programming Languages, C, Compiler Design

254 points by LorenDB 6 days ago | 298 comments

Peephole optimizations: adding `opt_respond_to` to the Ruby VM, part 4 (jpcamara.com)
In The Ruby Syntax Holy Grail: adding opt_respond_to to the Ruby VM, part 3, I found what I referred to as the “Holy Grail” of Ruby syntax. I’m way overstating it, but it’s a readable, sequential way of viewing how a large portion of the Ruby syntax is compiled.

Ruby, Programming Languages, Performance Optimization, Compiler Design

38 points by chmaynard 21 days ago | 2 comments

A Novel Idea About `Functor` in Rust? (wolfgirl.dev)
So. In my last post about this compiler project, I wrote out the following trait definition, explaining that it’s what I was using to do type-safe AST transformations:

Rust, Programming, Functional Programming, Compiler Design

36 points by lukastyrychtr 49 days ago | 6 comments

Stop making me memorize the borrow checker (erikmcclure.com)
I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago. I am now knee-deep in several very complex Rust projects that keep slamming into the limitations of the Rust compiler. One of the most common and obnoxious problems is hitting a situation the borrow-checker can’t deal with and realizing that I need to completely re-architect how my program works, because lifetimes are “contagious” the same way async is. Naturally, Rust has both!

Rust, Programming Languages, Compiler Design, Software Development

177 points by signa11 62 days ago | 233 comments

Implementing an Intermediate Representation for ArkScript (lexp.lt)
ArkScript is a scripting language, running on a VM. To accomplish this, we had (as of September 2024) a compiler generating bytecode for the virtual machine, receiving an AST from the parser (and a few other passes like name resolution, macro evaluation, name and scope resolution…).

Programming Languages, Compiler Design, Virtual Machines

5 points by jackrabbit_ 91 days ago | 2 comments

C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte (open-std.org)
C has the CHAR_BIT macro which contains the implementation-defined number of bits in a byte, without restrictions on the value of this number. C++ imports this macro as-is. Many other macros and character traits have values derived from CHAR_BIT. While this was historically relevant in computing’s early days, modern hardware has overwhelmingly converged on the assumption that a byte is 8 bits. This document proposes that C++ formally mandates that a byte is 8 bits.

C++, Programming Languages, Standards, Compiler Design

288 points by Twirrim 92 days ago | 348 comments

Speeding up the Rust compiler without changing its code (2022) (kobzol.github.io)
…Yes, I know that the title looks like a clickbait. But it’s actually not that far from the truth :)

Rust, Programming Languages, Optimization, Compiler Design

13 points by thunderbong 104 days ago | 1 comments

Finding Simple Rewrite Rules for the JIT with Z3 (pypy.org)

Optimization, Programming Languages, Compiler Design, Formal Verification, Software Engineering

25 points by lukastyrychtr 183 days ago | 0 comments

Hydra: Generalizing peephole optimizations with program synthesis [pdf] (cs.utah.edu)