alumina VS erg

You can go surprisingly far with C, though LLVM is probably a better long-term option for a serious compiler, because it's a tool made for the job (unless you target exotic and/or embedded platforms that don't have LLVM support - but that's fairly unlikely).

C is very easy to get started with if you don't already know LLVM. The downside is that once your compiler is reasonably complete, you may spend quite a bit of time working around quirks of C (e.g. int promotion is very annoying when you already have full type information, so your compiler either has to understand C semantics fairly well or defensively cast every subexpression).

I have a C backend in my compiler (https://github.com/alumina-lang/alumina) and it works really well, though the generated C is really ugly and assembly-like. With #line directives, you can also get source-level debugging (gdb/lldb) that just works out of the box.

There are a few goodies that LLVM gives you that you don't get with C, like coverage (https://clang.llvm.org/docs/SourceBasedCodeCoverage.html). It works when done through clang, but easily be made to track the original sources.

Totally agreed about FFI. I wanted to make it easy to interop with C code and write expressive bindings.

Check for example the language bindings to LLVM's C API (fairly low level) and Tree-Sitter which is used internally (a bit higher level bindings)

https://github.com/tibordp/alumina/tree/master/libraries/llv...

https://github.com/tibordp/alumina/blob/master/libraries/tre...

However, I am not super happy with the current structure of the compiler and for the self-hosted one I'd like to fix those mistakes. For example, mono.rs is a giant module that does everything from mixin expansion, lowering from AST to IR, type checking and monomorphization. There are some bugs in Alumina that are quite hard to fix without a big refactoring (e.g. if a nested function binds generic parameters of the parent) and I'd like to get it right the next time around.

Looking through the code, Pylyzer seems to be a thin wrapper around Erg [1]. To typecheck, it converts your Python AST to an Erg AST, then runs its through the Erg typechecker and returns the errors.

Faster typechecking for Python is very much needed. But this project seems like it was built in a hackathon —- it is not a true standalone typchecker.

[1] https://github.com/erg-lang/erg

erg – A Python-compatible statically typed language

I have been developing a programming language for a few years and this week I published it on GitHub.