Tag: Java

August 24, 2008 Technology Post a Comment

Erlang on LLVM? or: Outsource your JIT!

Has anyone been working on using [LLVM][1] to do just-in-time code generation for the [Erlang][2] virtual machine?

Depending on the design and structure of the Erlang virtual machine, it doesn’t seem like it would be all that tough a project. And it could provide a nice performance boost for those projects that are starting to use Erlang like [CouchDB][3] and [ejabberd][4].

For an example of what I’m talking about, there’s a project called [VMKit][5] that has implemented the Java and .NET virtual machines atop LLVM with reasonable performance. Essentially, if you have a virtual machine, rather than skipping either just-in-time or static code generation entirely, or trying to do it all yourself for some specific platform on which you want to run, take a look at what you can do with LLVM and see if you can leverage its code generation instead.

[1]: http://llvm.org/
[2]: http://erlang.org/
[3]: http://couchdb.org/
[4]: http://www.ejabberd.im/
[5]: http://www.ejabberd.im/

April 15, 2006 Technology Post a Comment

Steve Yegge describes what’s wrong with Lisp

Steve Yegge, Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp:

You’ve all read about the Road to Lisp. I was on it for a little over a year. It’s a great road, very enlightening, blah blah blah, but what they fail to mention is that Lisp isn’t the at the end of it. Lisp is just the last semi-civilized outpost you hit before it turns into a dirt road, one that leads into the godawful swamp most of us spend our programming careers slugging around in. I guarantee you there isn’t one single Lisp programmer out there who uses exclusively Lisp. Instead we spend our time hacking around its inadequacies, often in other languages.

Steve does a very good job of articulating a lot of the things I dislike about Lisp, especially Common Lisp. One interesting thing, though, is that a lot (but not all) of the issues he raises are addressed by Dylan.

One of the more interesting things about Dylan in this context is that, despite not adopting a traditional message-based object system like Smalltalk or Objective-C (or their more static cousins C++ and Java), Dylan does push objects all the way down, but in a functional style. It appears to work pretty well, making it easy to define both nouns and verbs in the combinations a developer might need, and even (through its hygienic macro system) allow developers to extend language syntax too.