https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/truffle
Disclaimer: graalvm dev here.
Edit: typo
I know it's partly on me for not knowing the domain, but I honestly suspected somebody is trying to make fun of me with some concentrated technobabble.
Especially since I wouldn't expect the topic (configuration languages) to require complex mathematical machinery to work with. Now I have something interesting to dig into.
Let me tell about a revolutionary device called a Turbo encabulator.
One of the races in the books was the Anthropophagi (basically modeled on New Guinea headhunters). They talked like that.
Even now the OG comment says “Fuamura” but the quote in the GP comment has the original “Futurama” written in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation#Futamura_pr...
Especially the Futamura projections. It's almost magic and very few people have even heard of them.
I once saw a demo where someone took a simple operation in Ruby using inefficient-but-elegant syntax (including creating and sorting an array, where a simple loop would have been the appropriate approach in C). He compiled that using TruffleRuby and the entire array construction and sorting was completely optimized out of the generated bytecode.
Here is one of the many: https://youtu.be/bf5pQVgux3c?si=S8Dm5d_GXYXgJtnY
If you go looking for more you will find many more marbles.
And the (original, I think), Pokémon or Tech Term: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfsG7AEFLvlW68aIVIs...
not Futurama :D
I think that too, "Futamura projections" are important but they are very very far from "complex mathematical machinery" as you may hear it. They are indeed very simple (even mathematically trivial) and require no special background to understand.
What now?
Cue chase montage shenanigans with Under The Boardwalk playing in the background
Do you smell toast.
thanks, that will help improve the output.
GraalVM is an alternate JDK that can, among other things, do ahead-of-time compilation for Java.
Truffle is a framework for building languages, that sits on top of Graal.
Futamura Projections are a particularly interesting use case for compile-time partial evaluation.
With partial evaluation you have static (known at compile time) arguments to your function, and dynamic (known at runtime) arguments.
When “your function” is an interpreter, and your static arguments are source code, the output is effectively a self-contained compiled binary.
When your function is an interpreter, and the static arguments are the source code for the interpreter itself, that “self-contained compiled binary” is now itself a compiler.
I really like Pkl's comparison page, which includes its weak points as well! https://pkl-lang.org/main/current/introduction/comparison.ht...
Pkl’s native binaries are larger than those of other config languages.
It should be as fast and easy to use and reliable as something like esbuild, so I'd suggest they may want to rewrite it in Go like esbuild. I'm not a Go fan at all, but it clearly does some things really well.
The Gradle compatibility matrix is pretty complicated: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/compatibility.html...
I’ve also used Facebook’s Buck build system, as an attempt to get away from Gradle, and it’s also fussy about JDK versions.
You know that the code compiled using future version of java won' work in older versions..rt? I would like to know if any other programming language does that kind of thing.
> t should be as fast and easy to use and
How did you conclude that it's not fast? They are creating native binaries just like Go or any other AOT languages with GCs. Graal native images are as fast or faster than Go. Also it contains a REPL, that's why bigger size. So for CLI tooling as a developer using pkl, you won't see any difference if it's written in java + kotlin or golang.
Of course, but what surprises me is the lack of backwards compatibility -- future JVMs refusing the run old code. I get that you have to deprecate old unsafe APIs sometimes, but it feels silly that I need three different Java versions for different Android projects.
They are creating native binaries just like Go or any other AOT languages with GCs. Graal native images are as fast or faster than Go. Also it contains a REPL, that's why bigger size. So for CLI tooling as a developer using pkl, you won't see any difference if it's written in java + kotlin or golang.
That's good! I thought you needed Java to run it.
I figured I should give it a proper try, so I just downloaded it. 105MB!! They're not kidding when they say it's big. I also checked bun (47.7MB) and esbuild (9.8MB) for comparison.
pkl does seem to start up pretty fast, though. 1.6s on the first run (presumably just the time needed to cache that big binary) and ~100ms thereafter.
I'd actually say that our tooling in some ways is more mature. For example, I think our IDE experience (at least in JetBrains editors) is the best out there.
Apple employees can rate it as an old project among themselves, while it is more convenient for everyone else to rate the product from the moment of publication.
It seems like they did not aim to make yet another mvp configuration language, but something that can scale across a wide range of usage scenarios spanning all the way from short-lived processes reading a number from a file to huge libraries of default/override hierarchies. Lack of universality sets an upper bound for the value of a configuration language, particularly when seen through the lens of configuring heterogeneous tech stacks.
wtf is Graal? That sounds like a supporting character from Beowulf.
Polyglot and native compilation enabled runtime for JVM, can run Js, Python, Ruby and more.
That's pretty clever... How is this implemented in actual code though? I can't even begin to imagine how that magic machinery works.
I ask cause the Project Galahad page on openjdk.org is a bit sparse on details.
Some background on the recent changes there: https://medium.com/graalvm/truffle-unchained-13887b77b62c
Of course, I know those two frameworks are one of the engineering marble of the age and would understand even if they decided to go without any concrete needs for it.
Sadly they renamed Kyber to MLKEM.
In other words antlr and truffle are a great fit. We even use this pairing for our example language simplelanguage.