←back to thread

217 points ibobev | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.314s | source
Show context
derefr ◴[] No.44465643[source]
Would anyone here assert that there's any particular programming language that's better for writing emulators, virtual machines, bytecode interpreters, etc?

Where, when I say "better", I'm not so much talking about getting results that are particularly efficient/performant; nor in making fewer implementation errors... but more in terms of the experience of implementing an emulator in this particular language, being more rewarding, intuitive, and/or teaching you more about both emulators and the language.

I ask because I know that this sort of language exists in other domains. Erlang, for example, is particularly rewarding to implement a "soft-realtime nine-nines-of-uptime distributed system" in. The language, its execution semantics, its runtime, and its core libraries, were all co-designed to address this particular problem domain. Using Erlang "for what it's for" can thus teach you a lot about distributed systems (due to the language/runtime/etc guiding your hand toward its own idiomatic answers to distributed-systems problems — which usually are "best practice" solutions in theory as well); and can lead you to a much-deeper understanding of Erlang (exploring all its corners, discovering all the places where the language designers considered the problems you'd be having and set you up for success) than you'd get by trying to use it to solve problems in some other domain.

Is there a language like that... but where the "problem domain" that the language's designers were targeting, was "describing machines in code"?

replies(10): >>44465651 #>>44465842 #>>44465906 #>>44465934 #>>44466249 #>>44466377 #>>44466464 #>>44466501 #>>44467885 #>>44468314 #
johnnyjeans ◴[] No.44465842[source]
sml, specifically the MLTon dialect. It's good for all the same reasons ocaml is good, it's just a much better version of the ML-language in my opinion.

I think the only thing that ocaml has that I miss in sml is applicative functors, but in the end that just translates to slightly different module styles.

replies(2): >>44466166 #>>44467643 #
1. makeset ◴[] No.44467643[source]
I remember working through Appel's compiler textbook in school, in SML and Java editions side by side, and the SML version was of course laughably more concise. It felt like cheating, because it practically was.