Lice

Dependencies

• Rust toolchain (for building the runtime)
• C toolchain (for linking with libc)
• just (for running examples and tests)
  • Technically optional but recommended, for convenience.
• GHC (for building MHS)
  • GHC is technically optional but recommended, since self-hosted MHS is quite slow compared to GHC-hosted MHS.

Getting started

Install dependencies (see links).

Several convenience targets are defined by the justfile. You can list them by running just without arguments.

Working with examples:

$ just eg Example       # Build and run a basic example
Compiling Example to Example.comb... OK
Some factorials
[1,2,6,3628800]
$ just trace StrictData # Build and run an example with verbose logging
Compiling StrictData to StrictData.comb... OK
### OMITTED LOGGING VERBIAGE ###

Working with MicroHs regression tests (which are vendored):

$ just compile-test Arith # Build MicroHs regression test
Compiling Arith to Arith.comb... OK
$ just test Arith         # Run MicroHs regression test
Arith        ... [PASS]

TODOs

What is left to achieve language feature-parity with MHS's eval.c:

• Garbage collection (we never run gc_arena's collect() function lol)
• Arrays
• StrEqual and Compare
• Node casting
• RNF
• Most FFI stubs (famous last words: this should be straightforward)
• Dynamic FFI symbol resolution
• Serialization/deserialization

And optimizations to address some known deficiencies (though it would be interesting to benchmark without these optimizations):

• Packed memory layout
• String memory layout
• Array memory layout
• Be less safe about error-handling (many are unnecessary)