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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

What I'd like to see is "An Approach to Incremental Compiler Construction", i.e., a compiler that outputs code which evaluates its input incrementally wrt. previous inputs.

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Perhaps a nanopass framework is of interest? "a compiler as a collection of many fine-grained passes, each of which performs a single task" http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/nano-jfp.pdf

The best example I know of is Papa Carlo: http://lakhin.com/projects/papa-carlo/

I had been working on an incremental-compiler-generator in C++, but suspended the project recently because it's a lot of work.

Or how about a live programming environment that incrementally recomputes a new programming execution based on incremental changes to the program's code. Anyways, I've been working on this problem for a few years now...the first step is incremental compilation.

You're probably aware of Smalltalk already but in case you're not, I think it might be of interest to you. There's an open source implementation of Smalltalk called Pharo. They have a few screencasts and recordings of presentations at their website. http://pharo.org/documentation

Edit: Checked your profile. Going to say that yes, you almost certainly know about Smalltalk -- far more than do I.

I would argue this a lot with people like Gilad Bracha :), but ya. Incremental compilation is pretty trivial in Smalltalk though given the lack of a static type system.

...and no explicit native macro system either (lot can be laid atop it of course...).

There is a lot to be said for a language where a single edit somewhere in a program can't have snowballing effects across the entire codebase. In practice, that means deferring logic to the runtime...

Using purely functional data structures and an AST walking interpreter one could make this fairly compact.

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