The Bag of Holding

This program now compiles and runs under the Epoch trunk:

//
// SUMTYPEFUNCTION.EPOCH
//
// Basic test of functions operating on sum types
//

type test : integer | string



sumfunc : integer param
{
assert(param == 42)
}

sumfunc : string param
{
assert(param == "bletch")
}


entrypoint :
{
test foo = 42
test bar =...

Another productive week in Epoch-land!

The first phase of my recent set of changes was to introduce the internal concept of type families. These are groups of type ID tags that represent different categories of semantics. For example, I used to reserve everything above the ID number 20 as "structure" types; now, structure type IDs...

I'll just leave this here...


//
// Define a recursive structure for a singly linked list
//
// A list must contain at least one element. If empty lists
// are desired in a given context, use the algebraic sum
// type (list<T> | nothing) to indicate that the list may
// be empty.
//
// Note that the "next" member is either a...

I've finally launched Release 12 of the Epoch programming language!

Go check out the sources and binaries and also the...

I recently learned an interesting lesson in developing software that needs to scale to large capacities.

I can't get into the specifics of what I was working on, but the essential facts are more or less as follows:
It includes a cache algorithm
I tested it with as much load as my workstation could generate
In tests, it performed well as...

At long last, the checklist of major items to do for Epoch Release 12 is empty!

There are a few lingering TODOs in the code which I will probably try and knock out over the next few days, and then it's down to deciding how much additional work I really feel like doing before shipping R12. Considering that all the compiler tests pass, Era compiles...

The task list for Epoch Release 12 continues to shrink!

Right now there are basically six major things that definitely need to be done before I'd even consider shipping the release:
Operator precedence reimplementation (basically just need to do a quick Shunting Yard implementation in the new compiler)
Fix up code generation of...

A while ago I launched a site called Scribblings by Apoch with the intent of occasionally publishing little bits and pieces of useful code that didn't have any other particularly appropriate home.

At long last I've posted a new scribbling. As usual, it was motivated by something I really...

Did some more experimentation with LLVM and Epoch's JIT system; and damn I am pleased with the results.

After finally muddling through enough of the llvm-opt source code to figure out how to order all the optimization passes that LLVM offers, I got a lot of basic optimization and dead-code elimination working on the bitcode that the Epoch VM...

More hackery on Epoch/LLVM integration today; got some very promising results.

For comparison: at the end of my hacking marathon the other night, I had the VM running at about 950ms for the benchmark, and the JITted native code at around 720ms.


I'm now down to 920ms for the VM and 370ms for the native code.


The VM speed boost came from some minor...