konna VS durin

The second was called Konna. AFAIK it’s Finnish for “frog”, but sources seem to disagree? I don’t speak Finnish, I got the word from a Finnish video game. My third and current language is called Peridot. I’m pretty proud of this name, although it’s less searchable than the previous ones. The origin is pretty simple, I was just looking around at gemstones and thought peridot looked neat.

Continuing work on Konna. I recently finished implementing dependent pattern matching, a pretty big feature! I figured now is the time to do some refactoring and rewriting - the elaborator is the first thing on my list. Once all this maintenance work is done I'll be implementing features like implicit arguments, overloading, and pattern matching on code values.

Github repo: https://github.com/eashanhatti/konna

Continuing work on my functional language Konna. The structured editor has progressed a whole lot recently - the most glaring bugs have been fixed and you can work with the entire language in it. The language itself is going well too, I'm currently thinking through:

Working on a rewrite of Konna (formerly Clamn). After using Rust for a little over a year in the original implementation, I decided I wasn't enjoying it. I'm using Haskell for the rewrite - I'd always wanted to write a big project in Haskell anyway haha. Definitely enjoying the higher-level conveniences it offers. The rewrite has been underway for about two weeks now, and so far I've got basic dependent types and partial evaluation implemented.

Continuing work on my functional systems language Clamn. I'd taken the last few weeks to fix a bunch of performance issues, but now it's finally back to implementing features: record types. I've got dependent types in my lang, which means I can get a bunch of more exciting features for free by implementing records, ADTs for instance.

So I think I may be one of the few people in the world who has actually implemented a GC using LLVM's statepoint infrastructure. It's poorly documented and there are some gotchas, but I'd say it's definitely usable, and it works with basically any collector design, including moving collectors (I'm using Immix) and has no runtime bookkeeping overhead and allows LLVM to optimize the code without worrying about GC, which is nice. It's actually gotten a bit better with LLVM 13, too. If you're curious what a LLVM-based GC looks like, mine is in this folder. Of course, if you just want some sort of GC, you can also just link it with Boehm which is quite easy and has pretty good performance - this is what e.g. Crystal does, although they're talking about switching.

I also fixed lots of bugs in the GC and backend, so it should be a lot more stable now.

Recently, I've been working on adding garbage collection to Pika. I've successfully written an Immix-based garbage collector that works with the LLVM GC support infrastructure, and I'm currently working on integrating the GC with Pika, or really Durin, the dependently-typed intermediate representation that Pika compiles to. Because types are passed around at runtime, objects of unknown type and size can be stored unboxed in polymorphic data structures; but that makes keeping track of type information for heap allocations somewhat harder, because type information needs to be allocated and constructed at runtime in some cases. It's an interesting design problem, because you want constructing type information to be fast; but the GC will run much more often, so maximizing tracing speed by avoiding e.g. indirection in type information is important; and you also want to construct as much type information as possible at compile time and embed it as constants.