Hobbes – A Language and an Embedded JIT Compiler

Well I've done some work to split small header-only libraries out of the project to make it useful in other places without having to link in everything. Low-latency structured logging, data files, a minimal x86_64 backend (LLVM alternative), structured data compression, network/RPC, message conversion, shared memory data structures, ...

The compression method is pretty neat, has useful applications in other contexts as well. Basically the same way you can view types as propositions, you can view them as probabilities as well (which gives you a scheme for representing the bias in any structured data type). This idea works in other contexts too, like "time compression" for pattern-match translation (choosing an order for tests to match the bias in the data you're deconstructing).

It's hard to find time to write about this stuff with my day job though. :T

Oh, well there are two stories actually.

The first story is that it follows the tradition of naming programming languages after logicians/mathematicians (e.g. Haskell, Church, Russell, Pascal, ...). Because the Curry-Howard isomorphism (CH) links logic and programming languages, and ideas in programming languages often come from much older work in logic, it's pretty natural to go to logicians for names (IMHO). Thomas Hobbes was one of the first people to connect logic and computation (literally saying "by reasoning I understand computation") and the logical arithmetic he developed inspired other people to continue that work. I think that story is a reasonable justification, works well for a general audience.

The second story (the real story?) is that Morgan Stanley internally has a tradition of naming things after things in popular culture (and at least one or two cartoons), so I named the project after the comic book characters Calvin and Hobbes (CH). Actually the programming language was "Hobbes" and the compiler was "Calvin" because if you know the comic book, Hobbes is really just a figment of Calvin's imagination (which works well to explain how a compiler makes a programming language real). I am a fan of the comics and was reading them frequently with my son at the time. There's a "Calvin and Hobbes ismorphism" (because both characters are different views of the same mind) so it works really well as an extended metaphor for logic and programming languages, I think. :)

Well one way we deal with typical unstructured data is to prevent the unstructuring in the first place. The low-latency logging method (for example) uses something like a printf-style interface but stores all of the source data with exactly the types you intended to print -- you can always erase the structure by printing when you want to, but having the structure when you need it is very useful.

What "structure" means and how it works can have a lot of nuance. With hobbes we basically start with algebraic data types (which map to most C-style data structures and so can be shared without conversion with C/C++ code). It's been a while since I looked at R, but IIRC it's a lot like Scheme (e.g. maybe the data sharing/translation story is more complicated?).

We do have some things that are helpful for dealing with unstructured text data, like a built-in LALR parser generator and regex matching (integrated with general pattern matching), but it's not one of the main use-cases we've been focused on.