Hacker News Reader

Comment by bachback | Hacker News Reader

Code thats written in Lisp is using AST differently. It makes the process of generating machine code much easier. This in turn enables macros which is meta programming not available in non Lisp languages. However on the other hand I tried this avenue and since most modern computing is not Lisp based it severely limits its potential. I'm hoping for a Rust based Clojure or variant. Clojure has the problem its based on the java ecosystem which has severe downsides. A lisp thats based on python doesnt make much sense to me personally python isnt a good language to write other languages in. I think Zig and Rust would be the interesting choices. One attempt: https://github.com/clojure-rs/ClojureRS

View on HN

Wouldn't it make more sense then to compile existing languages to a Lisp? From what you said, it sounds like the goal of Lisp making generation of machine code faster/easier? Or is it that forcing programmers to encode there intent into a Lisp removes guessing and optimization overhead for the compiler?

You can invent another syntax with Lisp/Scheme macros if you want. When compiled or interpreted it will be macro-expanded, and then likely transpiled to an AST and then compiled into byte- or machine code.

Take a look at Racket languages for some examples.

Lisp syntax with the parens and so on means editing is inherently structural, which makes it relatively easy to reason about and restructure the code. In Python spaces have double meanings, both as separator between tokens and as a block separator, similar to e.g. {} or () in other languages. That makes structural editing relatively hard.

Read macros, ordinary macro bodies have to follow ordinary syntax rules.

yes, you can think of Lisp almost as an intermediate language. Lisp probably lends itself well to machine code generation but I haven't done enough assembly to really know that. its not designed for that, its just a side effect of the language primitives being very very short. you can write a basic Lisp interpreter in a few hours yourself https://norvig.com/lispy.html. Creating a decent compiled language takes a lot longer than that. Lisp only requires 5 or so primitives and it doesn't have a grammar.

it is a bit ackward for humans but machines can process it better because it has less structure. for example what I thought is that Lisp could potentially be a great choice to interop with Large Language Models with, because its potentially shorter code. Good clojure code can be 5-10x shorter than python code. With LLMs size of code matters a lot.

As I understand, that's pretty much exactly how WASM works. It can output either a `.wasm` binary or the same code in a `.wat` text format that looks like this:

    (func (param i64) (result i64)
      local.get 0
      i64.eqz
      if (result i64)
        i64.const 1
    else
      local.get 0
      local.get 0
      i64.const 1
      i64.sub
      call 0
      i64.mul
    end)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly#Code_representatio...

Thanks, I had no idea this was how it transpiled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com