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Comment by LightMachine | Hacker News Reader

Exactly! Sorry if that sounded to be the case. We're first focusing on making the runtime as fast as possible. Next step is to support some simple toy lang (like a Haskell-like and a Python-like) for people to start using. Only then we can start compiling existing languages, which is a colossal task (due to languages like JS having a bajillion features).

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you guys should do erlang/ (or a elixir) pretty simple functional languages that already have a lot of ergonomics around concurrency and parallelism! that would be awesome :)

I don't know, does Erlang elaborate to a simple core language?

Yes! https://www.erlang.org/blog/core-erlang-by-example/

Both elixir and erlang (and all Beam languages elaborate to Core Erlang)

This might be a dumb question, but is it possible to take something like WASM and make it run on HVM?

Yes but wouldn't be great. The problem is that these ultra low level assembly languages actually throw away a lot of information that is useful to parallelism. Recursive functions are great for HVM, but when compiled to assembly, that structure is lost.

I suppose it’s not always lost, but the call graph needs to be inferred, and you might risk applying low-level optimisations that only apply to CPU, which may break the ability to infer the highly parallelizable structure in the high-level language. Compiling to CPU assembly is sort of a step back.

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