ghc VS xl

of course it does! what else would you call something like chicken scheme [https://call-cc.org/], ats [https://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/], or ghc [https://www.haskell.org/ghc/]? they are not "scripts", they are full-blown compilers that happen to use C as their compilation target, and then leverage C compilers to generate code for a variety of architecures. it's a very sensible way to do things.

Agree about Haskell... as far as I'm aware there is actually no declarative/easily-readable definition of the Haskell syntax that is also complete, especially when it comes to the indentation rules, and the syntax is basically defined by the very (ironically) imperatively-defined GHC parser[0].

I prefer a syntax like in Pure[1], where the ambiguous, hard to parse indentation-based syntax is replaced by explicit semicolons (Yeah, you can use braces/semicolons in Haskell as well, but most code doesn't).

[0] https://github.com/ghc/ghc/blob/master/compiler/GHC/Parser/L...

[1] https://agraef.github.io/pure-lang/

GHC, the main Haskell compiler

GHCi, version 9.6.3: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Loaded GHCi configuration from /Users/daniel/.ghci ghci> :{ | split :: Float -> [Int] | split value = map(read . (:[])) . show | :} :3:15: error: [GHC-83865] • Couldn't match expected type: [Int] with actual type: a0 -> [b0] • Probable cause: ‘(.)’ is applied to too few arguments In the expression: map (read . (: [])) . show In an equation for ‘split’: split value = map (read . (: [])) . show

GHC is hosted on Gitlab, the Github repo is just a mirror. So money.

https://github.com/ghc/ghc

☁ ~ ghci GHCi, version 9.4.7: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help ghci> 6 + 3^2 * 4 42

Depending on who you ask, a programming language can be different things. If you ask the Haskell community, many will tell you that the language is the Haskell specification, and that what currently is being used is not Haskell itself, but an extension of Haskell that is supported by the GHC compiler. Similar to the C language, a programming language would be a specification.

GHCi, version 9.4.2: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Loaded GHCi configuration from ~/.dotfiles/ghc/.ghc/ghci.conf

From what I can read the author got really unlucky with some kind of radical API changes. Maybe at that time the LLVM team was a bit less serious with deprecations ?

I use LLVM since v9, nowadays I'm stuck on v15 (that's not because of LLVM btw).

Between the two versions there's been a radical change too, i.e "opaque pointers", but the transition was rather smooth as we were provided, for a long time, the two versions of the functions affected by the change. Maybe the LLVM team got more serious since the author experienced the said difficulties ?

Other thing I note is that the author uses the CPP API. I use the C one which exposes only a high-level subset of the CPP one. This encourages a saner use of LLVM, a more concrete separation between the front-end and the mid-end, although sometimes there are limitations.

A simple example of what encourages the C API, especially since opaque ptrs are added, is not to rely on LLVM to retrieve the IR type of an IR value. That should always be done using the AST, eg with an `.ir` field in your nodes.

Another one I remark, after a brief overview of LLVM-CRAP, is that the author had to change the internal data structure used, depending on the LLVM version [0]. Using the C API that would never had happened. The C API essentially allows to create block refs, instructions refs, value refs, type refs, contexts. Then you choose the containers you want to use to hold them. No need to switch to another stdcpp one, even if internally LLVM does so.

[0]: https://github.com/c3d/xl/blob/master/src/llvm-crap.cpp#L265