Implementing a JIT Compiled Language with Haskell and LLVM

http://www.stephendiehl.com/llvm/

by andars • 11 years ago

161 26 11 years ago

jdreaver• 11 years ago

This is common knowledge for a lot of people, but I have found the author's "What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell" article is awesome too:

http://dev.stephendiehl.com/hask/

jpetitto• 11 years ago

I've implemented this toy compiler (minus JIT) in Java, following the tutorial on the LLVM website (which uses C). After browsing through the Haskell code, it is incredible how much more suitable a statically-typed, functional language is for compiler development when compared to an imperative language like Java. The code is much more terse and most importantly, readable.

chrisseaton3• 11 years ago

Yes languages like Haskell and Lisp are excellent for compiler development, as a compiler is one big pure function that involves a lot of transformations on recursive data structures. And what are language academics interested in doing? Implementing languages. So the languages they design are often suited to that task.

tmk1108• 11 years ago

Would you say something like Clojure is also suitable for compiler development or not?

Peaker2• 11 years ago

I think the greatest features of the ML family for compiler development are great AST representations (as algebraic data types) with pattern-matching. When you change the AST, it is very easy to go and fix all the AST transformations to handle less/more cases or fix the types.

There are other great features for compiler development in the ML family, but almost all of them revolve around static types.

Can you explain what you mean when you say Lisp is excellent for compiler development? When changing the AST, how would you go about changing all the code that needs to be changed?

zeckalpha2• 11 years ago

All programs are compilers when you come down to it. Even web apps compile web requests to HTML. There are just two kinds of programs: compilers, and daemons (which are just compilers with an infinite loop).

ghc• 11 years ago

It just so happens that the author is hiring Haskell engineers right now to do related work: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/642790047163375616

the_french• 11 years ago

Last semester for a compiler course I was taking we had to implement a compiler for a subset of Go (called GoLite), with free reign over language choices. I chose to implement a compiler[0] using Haskell and LLVM, this article helped a _lot_ when I was writing codegen, especially since it was my first real Haskell project.

However, some of the most interesting and important issues are left out of it. Some examples are implementing exceptions, threading, imports, garbage collection, closures , etc.. I would love a more advanced version of this article that discusses how to implement a more advanced compiler with more modern features (specifically in LLVM).

[0] github.com/xldenis/mgc

arthurcolle2• 11 years ago

Sorry for offtopic but anyone know performance benchmarks LLVM vs BEAM ?

troutwine• 11 years ago

They're not really comparable things. One is a bytecode VM (BEAM) and the other is a bunch of compilation infrastructure. As well, BEAM is optimized for heavy network-oriented concurrency and only incidentally is not-slow on a CPU. If you run a CPU-only race with a BEAM targeting language (Erlang, Elixir, LFE etc etc) you're going to be disappointed.

arthurcolle2• 11 years ago

Thank you for the compare/contrast!

Implementing a JIT Compiled Language with Haskell and LLVM

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