The MetaC Language | Hacker News Reader

The MetaC Language

maier-komor.de

67 pointsnkurz15 comments

For a well-maintained and actively used alternative, try coccinelle, the "semantic patch" tool: http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/

From the publication dates, this could be what Thomas Maier-Komor got his PhD for; however, since he now appears to have a full-time job at BMW, I wouldn't count on this being developed further.

There's still Cil if you speak Ocaml: http://kerneis.github.io/cil/doc/html/cil/

Non-free software, don't think about using it for anything real.

Oh that's right, you can't make anything real with software you pay for. I had almost forgotten.

Nearly impossible in this kind of project. Even if it spawns out of a commercial entity, these kind of things require a wide community acceptance and contribution to be taken seriously and be really useful.

I mostly agree. It could always find a niche somewhere. My snark was about "it's not free so don't use it".

While the term "free" can be ambiguous, I've found that the specific phrase "non-free" (as opposed to "paid" or "commercial" or similar) almost always tends to mean "proprietary", as an antonym of "Free Software" or "Open Source".

So, I'd read the comment you replied to as "not Open Source", which I likewise consider a fatal flaw in tools I depend on for software development and build systems. No community around it, no recourse if the original author loses interest (which looks like the case here), and no ability to work on it myself.

C needs to be adopted as an intermediate language like JS is for the web. C has the best ecosystem of all. This kind of tool is the right thing, and for once I like to see the focus of the author on embedded systems rather than large scale systems (both worlds are very different from an implementation standpoint, especially around memory management).

I agree, and there are some already out there: check out Nimrod (http://nimrod-code.org) which compiles to C.

I am waiting for Meta Meta C.

Could we just call it ++C for short?

  Or maybe **C, to account for all the indirection.

  Surely you must mean C**, which is the type of a thing 
  which you can dereference twice to get C. Otherwise, 
  you're dereferencing C twice, which gets you machine 
  instructions, I guess.

Actually I think it'd get you a processor design instead. Dereferencing it once would get you machine level instructions.

Not if you compile via LLVM/clang.

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