Jank is C++

I'm not surprised to see that Jank's solution to this is to embed LLVM into their runtime. I really wish there was a better way to do this.

There are a lot of things I don't like about C++, and close to the top of the list is the lack of standardization for name-mangling, or even a way mangle or de-mangle names at compile-time. Sepples is a royal pain in the ass to target for a dynamic FFI because of that. It would be really nice to have some way to get symbol names and calling semantics as constexpr const char* and not have to deal with generating (or writing) a ton of boilerplate and extern "C" blocks.

It's absolutely possible, but it's not low-hanging fruit so the standards committee will never put it in. Just like they'll never add a standardized equivalent for alloca/VLAs. We're not allowed to have basic, useful things. Only more ways to abuse type deduction. Will C++26 finally give us constexpr dynamic allocations? Will compilers ever actually implement one of the three (3) compile-time reflection standards? Stay tuned to find out!

> the lack of standardization for name-mangling

I don't see the point of standardizing name mangling. Imagine there is a standard, now you need to standardize the memory layout of every single class found in the standard library. Without that, instead of failing at link-time, your hypothetical program would break in ugly ways while running because eg two functions that invoke one other have differing opinions about where exactly the length of a std::string can be found in the memory.

This standard already exists, it's called the ABI and the reason the STL can't evolve past 90s standards in data structures is because breaking it would cause immeasurable (read: quite measurable) harm

Like, for fuck's sake, we're using red/black trees for hash maps, in std - just because thou shalt not break thy ABI

We're using self-balancing trees for std::map because the specification for std::map effectively demands that given all the requirements (ordering, iterator and pointer stability, algorithmic complexity of various operations, and the basic fact that std::map has to implement everything in terms of std::less - it's emphatically not a hash map). It has nothing to do with ABI.

Are you rather thinking of std::unordered_map? That's the hash map of standard C++, and it's the one where people (rightfully) complain that it's woefully out of date compared to SOTA hashmap implementations. But even there an ABI break wouldn't be enough, because, again, the API guarantees in the Standard (specifically, pointer stability) prevent a truly efficient implementation.

Are there open source libraries that provide a better hash map? I have an application which I've optimized by implementing a key data structure a bunch of ways, and found boost::unordered_map to be slightly faster than std::unordered_map (which is faster than std::map and some other things), but I'd love something faster. All I need to store are ~1e6 things like std::array<int8_t, 20>.