Nice work. It's worth the extra length in order to buy correctness and portability that you yourself don't have to maintain.
Lisp is the simplest language to bootstrap for sure. Would be nice to get everything out of the bootstrapper that isn't the core Lisp language. Of course, it's probably worth having handcrafted LLVM code for the primitives that greatly affect performance.
—S
On Mon, Oct 5, 2020 at 7:40 AM Attila Lendvai attila@lendvai.name wrote:
How hard would it be to do this in LLVM, I wonder?
i've done that already, and with LLVM the self-hosting is about 3000 kLoC, although i'm looking into new features that would hopefully allow shrinking/simplifying the codebase back a little. mostly by separating the code that is strictly needed for the bootstrap process from the ever-growing set up libs and utils that get added for other tests and actual uses of the language.
most of the extra lines are needed because the LLVM IR has a strict type system that had to be accommodated when compiling e.g. FFI calls and such.