unified VS Graal

From TFA:

> My idea was that surely it's possible to write a bunch of markdown, and then have that get wrapped in a bunch of JSX tags that come pre-styled, using the styles of your existing repo? For example, what I expected was to be able to write *test* (Markdown for bold) and then get a component that looked liketest where is a library-defined React component

It surely is possible, so perhaps I can share some links if others are wondering the same thing.

If you like to roll your own solution for that, you can use the unified ecosystem: https://unifiedjs.com/

However, if you want JSX just do what everyone does and reach for MDX:

Styling the blog, figure out the eco-system within UnifiedJs, remark-rehype, oh boy, I could write another blog with that.

To build the Markdown editor (and the preview, mostly), I decided to use unified, an ecosystem of tools allowing the developer to parse a format into an abstract tree and back into another format (for example, markdown to html) and modify said tree (for example, to add specific classes to certain html elements before they are converted to an actual html string. The basics of how to do so can be found in this article, but they mostly consist of:

It’ll take you a few hours to become proficient in the “unified” syntax tree libraries. So worth it. Easy fully customized conversion to/from html, react, plain text, markdown, you name it. https://unifiedjs.com/

Why universal? Because a lot of languages are simillar in a bunch of ways and it might be good to reuse existing parts of the compiler to speed up the process of writing new DSLs for example. Also a pretty big use-case is not for compilers itself but just for transformers like Markdown to HTML, there are already a lot of libraries (like https://github.com/unifiedjs/unified for ASTs and https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ for parsing) that try achieve similar goals but they are not working together.

Unified is a framework to process Markdown. It's a plugin-based tool that allows you to inspect and modify the way Markdown is converted to other formats like HTML.

under the hood, the markdown is parsed by the unified remark and rehype processors, which in turn under the hood manipulate the markdown + HTML as an AST, which gives a lot of flexibility on parsing and rendering markdown. The editor uses them as plugins, which allows me to pick the features and inject them into the editor, one such injectable feature is the custom-made "copy from anywhere & paste as markdown" feature.

Having the flexibility to create custom React Components for markdown is essential and with react-markdown, we can achieve this in just a few lines of code. Boosting performance, increasing link security, and having overall increased capabilities for our markdown data are what we achieve here. Aside from the improvements within our application, this component is super easy to use and taps us into the unifiedjs (giving us superpowers!).

The Markdown processor used unified assets.

Contrary to what vocal Kotlin advocates might believe, Kotlin only matters on Android, and that is thanks to Google pushing it no matter what.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-top-programming-languages-2023

https://snyk.io/reports/jvm-ecosystem-report-2021/

And even so, they had to conceed Android and Kotlin on their own, without the Java ecosystem aren't really much useful, thus ART is now updatable via Play Store, and currently supports OpenJDK 17 LTS on Android 12 and later devices.

As for your question regarding numbers, mostly Java 74.6%, C++ 13.7%, on the OpenJDK, other JVM implementations differ, e.g. GraalVM is mostly Java 91.8%, C 3.6%.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk

https://github.com/oracle/graal

Two examples from many others, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

Pkl was built using the GraalVM Truffle framework. So it supports runtime compilation using Futurama Projections. We have been working with Apple on this for a while, and I am quite happy that we can finally read the sources!

https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/truffle

Disclaimer: graalvm dev here.

That's pretty interesting. It's not as aggressive as Bee sounds, but the Espresso JVM is somewhat similar in concept. It's a full blown JVM written in Java with all the mod cons, which can either be compiled ahead of time down to memory-efficient native code giving something similar to a JVM written in C++, or run itself as a Java application on top of another JVM. In the latter mode it obviously doesn't achieve top-tier performance, but the advantage is you can easily hack on it using all the regular Java tools, including hotswapping using the debugger.

When run like this, the bytecode interpreter, runtime system and JIT compiler are all regular Java that can be debugged, edited, explored in the IDE, recompiled quickly and so on. Only the GC is provided by the host system. If you compile it to native code, the GC is also written in Java (with some special conventions to allow for convenient direct memory access).

What's most interesting is that Espresso isn't a direct translation of what a classical C++ VM would look like. It's built on the Truffle framework, so the code is extremely high level compared to traditional VM code. Details like how exactly transitions between the interpreter/compiled code happen, how you communicate pointer maps to the GC and so on are all abstracted away. You don't even have to invoke the JIT compiler manually, that's done for you too. The only code Espresso really needs is that which defines the semantics of the Java bytecode language and associated tools like the JDWP debugger protocol.

https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/espresso

This design makes it easy to experiment with new VM features that would be too difficult or expensive to implement otherwise. For example it implements full hotswap capability that lets you arbitrarily redefine code and data on the fly. Espresso can also fully self-host recursively without limit, meaning you can achieve something like what's described in the paper by running Espresso on top of Espresso.

I'm also using GraalVM if that's of any help.

Quarkus is one of Java frameworks for microservices development and cloud-native deployment. It is developed as container-first stack and working with GraalVM and HotSpot virtual machines (VM).

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply DCEVM went poof, just that I was sad it didn't make it into OpenJDK so one need not do JDK silliness between the production one and the "debugging one" since my experience is that's an absolutely stellar way to produce Heisenbugs

And I'll be straight: Graal scares me 'cause Oracle but I just checked and it looks to the casual observer that it's straight-up GPLv2 now so maybe my fears need revisiting: https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/vm-23.1.0/LICENSE

> to be compiled to a single executable is a strength that Java does not have

I think this is very outdated claim: https://www.graalvm.org/

https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7182