ulisp-builder VS terra

There is a uLisp Builder that generates platform-specific builds from a single codebase.

> The uLisp Builder is a set of programs written in Common Lisp to allow you to build a version of uLisp for a particular platform from a common repository of source files.

> The aim of the Builder was to make it easier to maintain uLisp across multiple platforms. Where the C function for a particular uLisp feature is identical on all platforms there is just a single occurrence of that source in the Builder repository.

uLisp Builder - http://www.ulisp.com/show?3F07

GitHub repo - https://github.com/technoblogy/ulisp-builder

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uLisp for STM32 boards - http://www.ulisp.com/show?29ST

Repo - https://github.com/technoblogy/ulisp-stm32

I'm a big fan of uLisp, got it running on an ESP8266. Love how the whole language fits in a single file, making it easy to hack around.

Recently I learned how the author generates the uLisp variants for different platforms using Common Lisp:

https://github.com/technoblogy/ulisp-builder

..And an accompanying article to describe how it works:

uLisp Builder - http://www.ulisp.com/show?3F07

Also, a treasure trove of other Arduino and AVR projects by the author here:

http://www.technoblogy.com/

Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.

Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).

But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.

Terra is the language you're looking for: https://terralang.org/

Wow, amazing stuff. I love Lua, it was how I learned programming as a kid. Coincidently from the same world as the author. Open Tibia.

The author made a custom client (https://github.com/edubart/otclient) for the game that is still very much in active use by thousands of players. He's a very skilled developer.

Great to see AOT typed Lua, I know of the other solutions: Luau, Teal, TypeScriptToLua, Terra, etc., but this one is my favorite so far.

Love the simple compilation to C (and WASM support via Emscripten). Though Terra's JIT is enticing and good replacement for LuaJIT, this is for embedded systems, it's a good replacement for Lua PUC-Rio.

The World:

- https://luau-lang.org/

- https://terralang.org/

- https://github.com/teal-language/tl

- https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Terra is a language that can also do that, and uses Lua as the metaprogramming language. Types are just Lua values.

But unfortunately, there's a lot of work left kind of half-baked so using the language is a pain... if someone invested a lot of time to make Terra work properly and added some tooling around it, wrote proper docs and so on, it would be a really interesting language.

https://terralang.org/

(I am slightly familiar with a language called Terra (https://terralang.org), which couples C with Lua, where the Lua is basically used as the metaprogramming layer ... sort of like comptime in Zig. And making an SOA data structure is the kind of thing you could do in Lua in Terra. So that was partly the basis for my question).

> why can't the hardware designer do something simple and clean

If it was easy, it would not need firmware in the first place. Firmware is there because people expect certain features and quality of life. See softmodems.

> write some assembly (without abusing the assembler preprocessor...)

You want https://terralang.org/ and not "just C"/"just Assembler" instead ?