2026–01–04
1404/10/14
ANNO·​VICESIMO·​NONO·​DIE·​TRECENTESIMO·​SEXAGESIMO·​PRIMO·​VITÆ·​POVYA
Quotes & Excerpts

I’m particularly fond of the organization of the OCaml compiler: it doesn’t really follow a classical separation of concerns, but emits good quality code. E.g. Its instruction selection is just pattern matching expressed in the language, various liveness properties of the target instructions are expressed for the virtual IR (as they know which one-to-one instruction mapping they’ll use later - as opposed to doing register allocation strictly after instruction selection), garbage collection checks are threaded in after-the-fact (calls to caml_call_gc), its register allocator is a simple variant of Chow et al’s priority graph colouring (expressed rather tersely; ~223 lines, ignoring the related infrastructure for spilling, restoring, etc.)

CONTIFICATE

[Replying to “I wonder, at which point it is worth it to make a language?”:] AT ANY POINT.

No exist, nothing, that could yield more improvements that a new language. Is the ONLY way to make a paradigm(shift) stick. Is the ONLY way to turn “discipline” into “normal work”.

MAMCX
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