Work on Elixir/LFE port to Erlang stopped

[Matus Kmit]

Hi

As I have mentioned in a previous thread I have been working on an Elixir/LFE port of Shen targeting Erlang VM. Unfortunately, I am not able to continue working on this project(s) as my priorities in life have shifted.

I wanted to at least roughly let you know what I could achieve so far, so that you in general and particularly those interested in this platform know.

Elixir port:

- Interpreter.

- It has a Klambda REPL (good for testing things when porting the primitives).

- Very slow. I think it has mainly to do with the fact that functions are not compiled and the way how currying/partial application is performed.

- When I stopped working on it had only one failing test, although now it is broken due to some other reason. It could be anything from upgrades of Elixir/Erlang/OTP which happened in the meanwhile, screwing something with git branches or something in code.

- Functions and global variables namespaces are implemented using Genserver.

- Vectors are implemented using Agents wrapping native Erlang arrays.

- Source code is to be found here: https://github.com/nimaai/shen-elixir

LFE/Erlang port:

- Compiled.

- This was supposed to become the final port, leaving the Elixir one behind.

- Just in the beginning, but one can see how Klambda can be compiled to LFE and which primitives are implemented using functions and which using macros.

- Namespaces are done with simple ETS tables instead of Genserver. I don't know if this is good idea but should work.

- The mapping between Klambda and LFE is very straightforward as the latter one is a Lisp too.

- You can compile down to Erlang VM .beam files via this path: Shen -> Klambda -> LFE -> BEAM.

- Working with LFE/Erlang feels quite intuitive due to couple of similarities with Shen:

-- Pattern-matching (LFE, Erlang?).

-- Function variables beginning with capital letter (Erlang not LFE).

-- Self-evaluating symbols (Erlang not LFE).

- Due to the above last 2 reasons one may consider to compile to Erlang instead of LFE, but a Lisp is a Lisp.

- Source code is to be found here: https://github.com/nimaai/shen-lfe

I hope someone gets inspired by my incomplete efforts and writes his own fast port of Shen to Erlang VM. Because, although I won't continue with my work, Shen definitely deserves one!

Greetings,

Matus

[Mark Tarver]

Thank you for that Matus.

Mark