How to make a fast dynamic language interpreter

 (zef-lang.dev)

87 points | by pizlonator 3 hours ago

4 comments

  • tiffanyh 43 minutes ago
    I see Lua was included, wish LuaJIT was as well.
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    • pizlonator 41 minutes ago
      I bet LuaJIT crushes Zef! Or rather, I would hope that it does, given how much more engineering went into it

      There are many runtimes that I could have included but didn’t.

      Also, it’s quite impressive how much faster PUC Lua is than QuickJS and Python

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      • zephen 5 minutes ago
        > it’s quite impressive how much faster PUC Lua is than QuickJS and Python

        Python's execution time is mostly spent looking up stuff. I don't think lua is quite as dynamic.

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  • boulos 1 hour ago
    How's your experience with Fil-C been? Is it materially useful to you in practice?
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    • pizlonator 1 hour ago
      I’m biased since I’m the Fil.

      It was materially useful in this project.

      - Caught multiple memory safety issues in a nice deterministic way, so designing the object model was easier than it would have been otherwise.

      - C++ with accurate GC is a really great programming model. I feel like it speeds me up by 1.5x relative to normal C++, and maybe like 1.2x relative to other GC’d languages (because C++’s APIs are so rich and the lambdas/templates and class system is so mature).

      But I’m biased in multiple ways

      - I made Fil-C++

      - I’ve been programming in C++ for like 35ish years now

  • grg0 2 hours ago
    Interesting, thanks for sharing. It is a topic I'd like to explore in detail at some point.

    I also like how, according to Github, the repo is 99.7% HTML and 0.3% C++. A testament to the interpreter's size, I guess?

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    • pizlonator 2 hours ago
      I committed the statically generated site, which is wastefully large because how I generate the code browsers

      But yeah the interpreter is very small

  • Futurmix 1 hour ago
    [flagged]