llvm-project VS Fennel

I forgot to say that I use this llvm build. Just download the release and point the clangd server to it.

Xtensa support (esp32). Will be interesting how this will be for Rust and Zig support for esp32

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/llvm/lib/Targ...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Xtensa-Backend

https://github.com/espressif/llvm-project/issues/4#issuecomm...

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/5467#issuecomment-1465...

Hopefully, in the future the installation will be simpler, as we are trying to upstream our LLVM changes (first 10 patches are already accepted!), and once we manage to upstream LLVM changes we will proceed with upstreaming our Rust fork changes.

The main discussion can be led back to this GitHub issue and this comment; fortunately, we don't need to build espressif's llvm fork anymore as they supply the clangd (this is the language server we need) and you can find the zip here. I'll briefly list down the steps required to set up vim with clangd to take advantage of clangd's features (auto-completion, linting, code refactoring ...)

In my case, it's pretty annoying that the Xtensa platform doesn't have official LLVM support. It's in progress but going very slowly.

The link to the espressive issue trackers: https://github.com/espressif/llvm-project/issues/4

Xtensa. They've got a fork of LLVM that supports it that they're working toward getting upstreamed. The community has a fork of rustc that uses it (and a quickstart crate) while we wait for it to get upstreamed.

https://github.com/espressif/llvm-project/issues/4 is a good example why updating llvm isn't easy and takes a lot of time.

Just to clarify - Gambit, Chicken, and Carp all compile to portable C.

I hadn't realized LLVM mainline doesn't support Xtensa. I'm surprised.

D does support Xtensa via LDC (https://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected]...). It looks like GDC also nearly supports it, requiring only a minor patch at present.

A functioning LLVM backend does exist (https://github.com/espressif/llvm-project/issues/4) and might be making very slow progress towards being merged. A quick search shows that it works for Rust. I suspect (but don't know) that it might work for Terra as well.

There's also the LLVM C backend (https://github.com/JuliaComputingOSS/llvm-cbe) but I've no idea how efficient such an approach is when applied to real world embedded tasks.

It's interesting: minimal software is out there, but folks don't tend to choose it. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to be conservative in my dependencies, and this encourages a lightweight stack that tends to perform pretty well. These days, I'm favoring tools like Lua, SQLite, Fennel[0], Althttpd[1], Fossil[2], and the Mako Server[3] and find that great, lightweight, stable, efficient software is to be had, for free, but you have to go a bit off the beaten path. This isn't stuff you hear about on Stack Overflow.

In terms of frontend, which the post focuses on (Google Docs and a 30MB doc), I guess I'm conflicted. While I tend to favor native apps + web pages, I'm also a daily Tiddlywiki user, and I really think web apps have their place (heck, one idea I'm working on is a lightweight local server that lets you run web apps like Tiddlywiki). But without a doubt, Tiddlywiki is more resource intensive than Emacs (my go-to for notetaking when I'm not on TW). My tab for a 6MB Tiddlywiki file uses 155MB of RAM, and my (heavily customized, dozens of open buffers) Emacs session uses 88MB. So I do think the author has a good point.

[0]: https://fennel-lang.org/

Eh it's not just luajit and luajit didn't create that problem either. It's a symptom of lua actually succeeding at its design goal of being easily embedded as an extension language. A significant number of incompatible runtimes are more popular than the most recent puc lua, including I believe the older official lua 5.2 released in 2011.

I've done a fair bit of professional lua development and I don't think I've ever written standalone up-to-date puc lua except maybe for some tooling & scripts. It's such a small language and used in such a way that the runtime, distribution method, and available APIs have much more impact on your use (and compatibility) than the version.

Virtually everyone shipping a lua environment is also shipping changes to it that make it a unique target, if only extensions to the standard library. This is why I think syntax layer-only approach like fennel's is the correct choice for improving on lua. It mirrors lua's runtime semantics exactly, and allows you to access the implementation peculiars on their own terms and so can just be run on time of any lua system.

https://fennel-lang.org

Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.

> I’m positive that there is a Lispy language out there (actually in existence, or the aether) that is appropriate for embedded work, but the constraints of the target make it difficult to envision.

Perhaps Fennel* fits the bill?

* https://fennel-lang.org/

I've also seen neovim plugins written in fennel [0], so if you want something lispy, that's possible now.

[0]: a Lisp that compiles to Lua, https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel

Something similar: Fennel (https://fennel-lang.org/) is a lisp that compiles into Lua, which nvim can use as plugins, so you can write nvim plugins in a lisp. Aniseed (https://github.com/Olical/aniseed) makes this really easy.

If you want a more FP language on the Lua runtime, you might be interested in Fennel. I wrote a post about adding Fennel compiler to a hslua interpreter a while back, which might be useful for you.