inkwell VS starlark-rust

Secondly, I have learned about LLVM, and I have learned about the Inkwell library on Rust (It's a New Kind of Wrapper for Exposing LLVM (Safely)). Has anyone used this library before? Is this a good practice? Is it suitable for my compiler? Can I write some optimization passes of my own using this library?

inkwell is a great llvm binding for rust and it has an implementation of kaleidoscope

I'm working on a compiler that uses the LLVM wrapper Inkwell for compilation. In order to compile something in inkwell, unless I'm missing something (which I very well might be), you need two structs:

Compiler backends (If building JIT/machine compiled langauges) 1. cranelift 2. inkwell - safe rust wrapper around llvm

I'm currently using the Inkwell bindings for Rust, which I've found actually pretty nice. In terms of generating LLVM IR, the C bindings (which is what Inkwell uses internally) can do anything you want them to (definitely not limited to trivial languages as someone else here said.) I'm even using the LLVM garbage collection infrastructure, with no problems (well, no problems in generating it; the LLVM GC infrastructure works pretty well but is sparsely documented, so actually writing a GC is fairly difficult, but it's doable). The C bindings are actually more stable than the C++ bindings (!), although not quite as stable as the textual IR format; but without the bindings you would have to write code to generate the IR yourself, the compiler would be slower as it must be emitted as text and then reparsed in a different process, and you would have less control over optimization.

safe llvm bindings https://github.com/TheDan64/inkwell

As we reviewed in this article LLVM IR has many use-cases and allows us to analyze and optimize source code through its passes. Knowing IR language itself will help us to write our passes and build projects around it for debugging, testing, optimizing. Currently, LLVM IR doesn't have Rust API. It's mainly used through the C++ library. However, some user-created repos are available on crates.io. There is a Rust binding to LLVM's C API - llvm-sys and two other, more Rusty APIs that are using LLVM: inkwell and llvm-ir. And finally, if you want to learn how to write a LLVM pass you should start here.

The high level crate is called inkwell.

https://github.com/TheDan64/inkwell is about as high-level as it gets (from what I've seen). It's based on top of llvm-sys, which is thankfully kept up-to-date with the LLVM releases.

On a side note, there are good high level bindings to llvm-sys, inkwell

I haven't seen anyone mention starlark yet. It's something I want to play with as a config language.

Aside from these, if you want some inspiration for a production-grade language built in Rust, you might want to go through the source code of Starlark and Gluon.

There is also a Rust implementation of Starlark as a starting point https://github.com/facebookexperimental/starlark-rust

To add to everyone else, please don't use YAML. Starlark is great _precisely_ because it is a readable, well known (nearly Python) language that is limited at the same time (no unbounded for loops, no way to do non-deterministic things like get the current time or `random()`).

This is a follow-up to Benchmarking mlua/rlua/rhai - Rust embedded scripting languages from 4mo ago; I just added the new Starlark implementation from Meta to the benchmark posted by @aleksru.

The Rust implementation has it as an experimental extension (https://github.com/facebookexperimental/starlark-rust/blob/m...)

u/ndmitchell has been working on a Starlark interpreter. He wrote up a blog post with some thoughts about different interpreter styles. He found that in his case using fixed sized instructions was about the same as byte-encoded ones, but compiling the AST to closures was also about the same performance as well, and doesn't need an AST->bytecode compiler.

As mentioned in other comments, type system features like algebraic data types (that Rust has) are really helpful. If you want a small-but-real example of a compiler in Rust (with an optimizer etc) then the starlark-rust compiler is good.

If your Rust program needs a more complicated configuration (conditionals, access to APIs and so on), also look at Facebook's Starlark parser and tooling[1]. Starlark is a subset of Python used by Bazel, Buck and a few other projects.

[1]: https://github.com/facebookexperimental/starlark-rust

The Facebook post gives a nice overview. It also links out to the home page for the project at https://github.com/facebookexperimental/starlark-rust/, which has an introduction and links to what Starlark is, the crates.io link, the docs.rs link etc.