mr-slippery-2861 / corvus

Low-level Lisp for LLVM

If you are here, you were probably looking for Hylas Lisp

This project is being rewritten. Please check back in a few megaseconds.

What is this?

A statically-typed, low-level dialect of Lisp that targets LLVM.

Why?

The era of dynamic languages if over. There is currently a 'race to the bottom': Languages like Rust and Nimrod are merging the world of low-level programming with high-level compiler features. cmacro is another one of my contributions to this movement.

Features

• Static typing with partial inference.
• Manual memory management with multiple safety guarantees.
• Common Lisp Conditions and Restarts for error handling.
• Macros and Common Lisp-style reader macros.
• Runtime optional.

Anti-Features

• Garbage Collection.
• Exceptions.

Status

See the Trello board.

Please don't post this on Hacker News yet.

Notes

This project was originally called Hylas Lisp. I have been working on it on and off since early 2012, but I've wanted something along these lines for a much longer time. It was originally written in C++, then in Common Lisp. Third time's the charm 😹.

The original repository was overwritten because I wanted a clean slate. I hope the code, in this third iteration, is to your liking. I have tried my best to write clean, concise code and comments.

There will eventually be a language reference and manual. For now, most of the documentation on the compiler implementation is available as comments throughout the source code.

Acknowledgments

• The LLVM compiler infrastructure project, an unparalleled contribution to the open source community.
• Jookia, for Unicode advice.
• Paul Graham, for rekindling my interest in Lisp.
• Danny Hillis for the idea of Xectors and the Connection Machine.
• Thinking Machines Corporation for the implementation of the above, and the concept of shapes in the C* language.
• Paul Khuong for a Common Lisp implementation of Xectors.
• Mozilla, for both Rust and sweet.js.

License

Copyright (c) 2014 Fernando Borretti

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.