Self-hosted Elixir?

[Daniel Azuma]

Hi all,

I've been working off and on for a few months on an Erlang->Elixir transpiler (mostly as an exercise for myself to learn Erlang semantics). I recently had the idea of applying it to the Erlang code in the Elixir core, creating a version of the Elixir compiler written completely in Elixir. Long story short, there are some caveats in the build process and a few bugs in the transpiler to work around, but today I finally got a proof of concept working and passing the tests.

So I was wondering whether the possibility of self-hosting the Elixir compiler had been discussed before. My initial thoughts were that it's often interesting to self-host; however, in this case all the core code would have to remain written in a "bootstrap" style of Elixir without access to the standard library, which might be awkward. But I was curious what else might have been discussed and what people's thoughts were.

Thanks,
Daniel

[José Valim]

A self-hosted compiler is honestly very low priority. The benefits are very small compared to the complications required for bootstrapping the language, which would likely include keeping a list of precompiled modules in the source so we can bootstrap without having Elixir pre-installed.

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Director of R&D

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[Eric E.]

Is the code available publically? Would be cool to see! :)

[Robert Virding]

It would definitely make it more difficult to download the sources and build a release. You would need quite a few pre-compiled modules to do that. Now all you need is Erlang which you need anyway to run the system.

Robert

[Daniel Azuma]

José and Robert: That does make a lot of sense. It's probably more practical for languages like Go where a binary distribution is the norm, less so for Elixir where building from source is more the norm.

Eric: Not yet. I'm still trying to fix some issues in erl2ex that I had to hack around (gruesomely) in order to get it to convert Elixir's source properly. Maybe in another week or so I'll be able to post reasonable instructions for how to do it, if anyone wants to tinker with it.

Thanks for the comments!

Daniel

[Eric Merritt]

Just to reinforce Robert. I did a language on the VM called Joxa a few years ago. Originally the compiler was written in Erlang. At some point we converted it to be self hosting and the cost of maintenance went up considerably. Even worse, it made it *much* harder for folks not familiar with the infrastructure to get up to speed and contribute. There is some upside to being able to say that a language compiles itself. However, in the beam environment I think that upside is vastly outweighed by the downsides. 

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[Ólafur Arason]

Hi everybody,

I just wanted to throw my two cents in because I'm working on

something similar to Daniel but a little bit different approach.[1]

I feel like Erlang is the the real heart of the Elixir system and I think

the sentiments that are expressed in this thread really show that. I

feel like there is a lot of flexibility that Elixir get's by having its

bootstrapping in Erlang, since features are introduced in Erlang's

otp first. It get's really when you are conceptually dealing with code

that is making the same code which I've had a bit experience with

keeping my code dogfoodable :) You might also introduce bugs

that go undetected and then fixing them is a pain since you are

using the same code to build everything.

This saying it maybe apt:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a

program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when

you write it, how will you ever debug it?

- Brian Kernighan

But that doesn't mean that the thought hasn't crossed my mind and

maybe an automatic version would be a nice experiment. But the

beauty is that Erlang is almost the same as Elixir under the hood,

almost :) It's not like Java to Clojure and Scala. An I think it's cool

that Erlang and LFE can do interesting things with Elixir. [1]

If I've read the source code of LFE correctly then lfe_trans has us

two already beat translating Erlang to LFE :) Maybe we should to

a vanilla Beam to anything. Maybe with Behaviours. Though the

problem I'm facing is mostly that it's just a lot of things to implement :)

Regards,

Olaf

[1] https://github.com/olafura/beam_to_ex_ast

     https://github.com/olafura/beam_to_ex

[2] A cool project would be making automatic

binding for Elixir code with nice Erlang syntax.