simplelanguage VS minivm

That sort of stuff is easy to do with Truffle (which, ironically, lets you define a language using what they call the "truffle dsl").

The SimpleLanguage tutorial language has a bigint style number scheme with efficient optimization:

https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage/blob/master/langua...

Truffle has no opinion on how you parse the sources. It cares about how you execute them from an intermediate Truffle guided representation produced by the parser.

In other words antlr and truffle are a great fit. We even use this pairing for our example language simplelanguage.

https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage

Do you have any feedback on how we could improve the docs? If so, please let us know!

I believe the easiest way to start a new Truffle language implementation is to fork SimpleLanguage [1] and turn it into your language. Did you try to do that?

[1] https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage

Finally, I would suggest you to take a look at the Truffle/GraalVM ecosystem(https://www.graalvm.org/graalvm-as-a-platform/language-implementation-framework/). The documentation is not exactly very elaborate, but a few good resources are Mumbler(http://cesquivias.github.io/blog/2014/10/13/writing-a-language-in-truffle-part-1-a-simple-slow-interpreter/#mumbler-language), SimpleLanguage(https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage), and (https://www.endoflineblog.com/graal-truffle-tutorial-part-4-parsing-and-the-trufflelanguage-class).

> I developed a unique way to write interpreters based on threaded code jumps and basic block versioning when I made MiniVM (https://github.com/FastVM/minivm). It was both larger and more dynamic than WebAssembly.

I'd be very interested to read more about this. It looks like you are using "one big function" with computed goto (https://github.com/FastVM/Web49/blob/main/src/interp/interp....). My experience working on this problem led me to the same conclusion as Mike Pall, which is that compilers do not do well with this pattern (particularly when it comes to register allocation): http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg00742.html

I'm curious how you worked around the problem of poor register allocation in the compiler. I've come to the conclusion that tail calls are the best solution to this problem: https://blog.reverberate.org/2021/04/21/musttail-efficient-i...

Maybe take a look at MiniVM[0]? It was on HN a couple months ago[1].

[0]: https://github.com/fastvm/minivm

MiniVM: A zero-dependency cross-language runtime on par with LuaJIT and C\ (19 comments)