Get the latest tech news
Zero Feet: a proposal for a systems-free Lisp
, I don't know what I've been told, rustaceans done stole Guy Steele's gold Some make the claim that "all languages depend on C";1 not only is this statement ill-typed, as implementations perhaps depend on other languages, and languages rarely do, but the statement would still be wrong if we correct it. Some will retort by writing parts of an implementation in another "system language"; more recently a Lisp-like system language has been proposed (again).
We intend to write an implementation of the Utena programming system, which is based on the Newspeak object model and Lisp evaluation semantics, using the proposed techniques. A common approach to improving the performance of the implementation is to write more modules in the host language; for example, dictionaries and sets in CPython are written in C, rather than Python. The appendix suggests hard-coding tests for base cases to break the infinite recursion, which will preserve the semantics of the object system, but is somewhat displeasing to read; and more importantly, it cannot be implemented in a language where all control flow is also comprised of message sends.
Or read this on Hacker News
