andreabergia

Yep, I've had that working in some earlier version of the tooling.

> I'd suggest rethinking this; people usually expect the tab key to auto-complete.

That's a fair point.

> At any rate, thanks for writing the description yourself.

I might let an LLM write the code, and even the user's manual, but I write my own blog post and comments. :-)

  from gremllm import Gremllm

  # Be sure to tell your gremllm what sort of thing it is
  counter = Gremllm('counter')
  counter.value = 5
  counter.increment()
  print(counter.value)  # 6?
  print(counter.to_roman_numerals()) # VI?

And anyway, it was not a particularly serious (or, for that matter, well written or argued) discussion. As I mentioned in literally the first line, it's just a rant :-)

PS: I am unsure what you mean with "relying on LLM for configuring things says it all". In my experience, this is one area where LLMs _really_ do help a lot - it has been much faster than going through the documentation (which I also did quite a bit of, in particular for conan).

Vacations, health insurance, parental leave are all given by law here (Italy). But, if they weren't, I guess they'd be pretty important.

I might actually fix this one :-)

I am not sure I am going to try it though - it probably is a bit too much code to change for something that I consider "done" and I am not working on. :)

    pub struct Class<'a> {
        pub superclass: Option<ClassRef<'a>>,
    }
    pub type ClassRef<'a> = &'a Class<'a>;

Initially I had implemented this with raw pointers, without lifetimes, but then I switched to the reference because it felt more "idiomatic" and I had to put the lifetimes just about everywhere to make the compiler happy.

If there are better ways to do this, I would be really happy to learn, though!

> Important note: this is a hobby project, built for fun and for learning purposes.

I am not going to repeat that in every part of the series. :-)

I also struggled with a got a ton of errors from the borrow checker initially, and I fixed many of those with a lot of explicit lifetimes, but it's not impossible that in some places they are unnecessary.

I did have a bit of experience with VMs before, I wrote many years ago a short series of posts about it on my blog, and at my previous job I dabbled a bit in JVM byte code to solve one very unusual problem we had for a customer. I also read the _amazing_ https://craftinginterpreters.com/ years ago and that gave me some ideas.

But this project was definitely big and complex. It took me a lot of time, and it got abandoned a couple of times, like many of my side projects. But I'm happy I finished it. :-)

I guess the solution would be to add an explicit API to create a GC root, invoked by native methods (which is a bit complicated by the fact that I use a moving collector).

Many years ago I was using SpiderMonkey in a c++ project and I seem to remember there were some APIs for native callbacks to invoke that rooted values. Same problem and similar solution. :-)

About the generics - some people have pointed out the same on reddit, and yeah, you are correct. The only thing that should be done is to read the Signature attribute that encodes the generic information about classes, methods, and fields (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-4.ht...)

As a matter of fact, I just did a test and the following code works! :-)

    public class Generic {
        public static void main(String[] args) {
            List<String> strings = new ArrayList<String>(10);
            strings.add("hey");
            strings.add("hackernews");

            for (String s : strings) {
                tempPrint(s);
            }
        }

        private static native void tempPrint(String value);
    }

I know the feeling - this project, like most of my other side projects, got abandoned a couple of times. But I was really curious about implementing a GC and, for once, I managed to finish something. I'm glad I did! :-)

Blogging about programming languages and technology I find interesting... when I have the time and the energy for it, which sadly isn't that often.

As an European, I don't think I will ever get used to the fact that in the US people can be told "go home, you're fired" like that, effective immediately.