or the experience of writing a performant compiler in Rust as a functional programmer…

Table of Contents⌗

Introduction⌗

These past few weeks, I’ve been spending most of my free time practicing Rust by building a small functional programming language called lily. I’ve decided to write it in said language for two reasons: fun is a mandatory answer, of course, but I really wanted to explore what it’s like to write performant programs from scratch in a language and field that I’ve never really spent much time on.

My experience with C and C++ were often riddled with unsafe and undefined behavior, and I can say for certain that I’ve been unproductive with these languages. On the other hand, I feel like I’m most productive when I have a direct discourse with the compiler, like I do with Haskell and PureScript.

From what I’ve seen so far, the Rust compiler rustc does an exceptional job at presenting errors to developers. Here’s an example of how errors are served by rustc during compilation.

error[E0502]: cannot borrow `arena` as mutable because it is also borrowed as immutable
  --> lily-cst/src/lib.rs:71:5
   |
62 |     let interners = Rc::new(Interners::new(&arena));
   |                                            ------ immutable borrow occurs here...
71 |     arena.reset();
   |     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ mutable borrow occurs here
72 |     println!("{:?}", result);
   |                      ------ immutable borrow later used here

That being said, this loooong-form blog post is quite different from my previous post, Free and Cofree, as it also serves as a “rolling” mind map while I’m developing the lily compiler.

Contents⌗

TBW…

Aethereal Arenas⌗

TBW…

Intrepid Interning⌗

TBW…

Tactical Tokenization⌗

TBW…

Miscellaneous⌗