Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhysd | Hacker News Reader

No. It is a C compiler compiled to Vim script. So it is actually a C compiler written in Vim script.

I think a more accurate way to describe it is that it's a C compiler written in C and then automatically transpiled to VimScript.

No human hand-authored this giant pile of VimScript: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rhysd/8cc.vim/master/autol...

Yes. It is compiled to Vim script using ELVM[1]. Though the author of Vim script backend of ELVM is me :)

[1]: https://github.com/shinh/elvm

That is very cool! So with ELVM one could put together a C compiler in TeX too? Or transpile Vim into Vim script to self-host it?

Cool. Why, though? I mean, it's not like this project has any practical value anyway, but wouldn't it be actually easier and more efficient to actually implement a C compiler in VimScript? Or is the vimscript ELVM backend the actual end-goal here, and C-compiler at question is basically just a proof that it works?

Thanks, at first I thought someone had written it in vim script, then I inspected the README in detail and learned it's only transpiled from C to vim script, which is not particularly exciting or impressive compared to a human wielding such a degree of vim script fu.

Ah - my impression went from 'this is pure masochism' to just 'this is slightly insane'.

I wonder how much faster a manually written C compiler in Vim script would be.

The current code is essentially assembly instructions running as Vim script, this gotta be incredibly slow, probably not much faster than an x86 emulator written in Vim script:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rhysd/8cc.vim/master/autol...

I wonder how much faster it would be if it was written in Vim9 script.

There's only one way to find out, bubba! You're gonna have to write an x86 emulator in vimscript for us, and tell us how it compares...

Time for JIT-compiled vimscript, I guess? Why should Javascript have all the fun.

Funny because neovim supports LuaJIT for it's lua init files by default. I wonder if there would be a way to compile vimscript to lua and have it everything inside the lua IR. Probably very hard, given the DSL nature of vimscript

Vim9script is already compiled (which is why it’s much faster), so there’s no need to go via Lua if you’re on ”normal” Vim :)

This was tried by ZyX-I when the Neovim project was started. AFAIK they managed to create an alternative parser for Vimscript, but the transpiler was never finished (or productionized?), I think due to incompatibilities that are hard to avoid. Some relevant issues:

- https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/170

- https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/387

- https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/392

- https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/801

Reply on news.ycombinator.com