I think programming languages have a tension between people trying to learn the language going "what the hell do these hieroglyphics mean, use keywords!" and people who know the language going "I just want to type less, let me use punctuation instead of words!"

#PLdev #programming

I haven't done enough programming language dev lately, but I just added a new syntax feature to a language I made a while ago (Gilia, https://github.com/mortie/gilia). I can finally do 'a += b' instead of 'a = a + b'

Now += isn't its own operator, instead '+' is an identifier, and "identifier with an equal afterwards" is a special kind of token. (Yes + is just a function)

This stuff is so satisfying to work on. Especially the bytecode gen part

Diff: https://github.com/mortie/gilia/compare/baa25ec9b7739c99baa063a77cf8bddcea5857bc..1fa300e34200e1a6f0cae3714056b56954737e08

#pldev #programming

I messed up a few years ago when adding list:find and similar functions to my language, #ArkScript
The language has a void value, nil, but those functions return -1 (as in C...)
Alas -1 is also a valid index in ArkScript (same as Python)

I'm unsure about how to change that

The deprecate and change the type in the next release option seems "decent", but I feel like it's abusing deprecation warnings

#pldev #langdev

I built an esoteric programming language: https://rphle.de/tzap/
It only has 4 instructions and no arbitrary values like numbers or memory addresses.
I challenge you to implement Fibonacci in it!

#esolang #pldev #programming #programminglanguages #challenge

A visual aid while debugging code to identify backward branches, number loops, etc...

#Projects #Compiler #PLdev

The graphs generated by iongraph (a Mozilla tool for SpiderMonkey) are a lot nicer than just trying to wrangle reasonable outputs from graphviz:
https://github.com/mozilla-spidermonkey/iongraph

Nice writeup about the layout algorithm here:
https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2025/10/28/iongraph-web.html

Strong temptation to build some custom graph generation tooling for my own language hackery. Looking at lightweight PDF generation libraries.

#PLdev #Projects #Compiler

Anyone know of any good writeups out there on the reverse linear scan register allocation (on SSA form IR).

I'm especially interested in discussion of register usage hints or constraints around things like calling conventions -- landing parameters in the right registers, but making the most of those registers outside of call boundaries, etc.

#PLdev #Questions

Implemented the RV32I pass-by-register calling convention in the simple SR32 code generator... as a compiler parameter.

Updated the emulator to support either calling convention (at runtime) for syscalls.

This all works, which is nice, but now I've just added a third dimension to the test grid, which is less nice.

#Projects #Compiler #PLdev

The desire to explore Subnautica 2 (now in early access) is warring with the desire to generate assembly from IR now that register allocation is happening.

#PLdev #Gaming #Argh