This is my attempt to implement as trivial language as possible via Truffle. After a bit of research I decided to implement Self. There are at least three reasons for doing that:
When I was visiting the Smalltalk course at Charles University in the middle of nineteen nineties we dedicated one hour to something simpler than Smalltalk called Self. Smalltalk itself was quite simple. Yet, surprisingly to us, the Self language really was simpler. The simplicity is one reason for trying to re-implement it.
The other thing I learned in the course was that we don't have hardware to run Self. A computer with 32MB of memory and SunOS was needed and we had just poor Pentiums with at most four megabytes hardly running Linux and X11. As a result I have not yet written and executed a single Self program yet. Re-implementing the language is a nice opportunity to do so!
Last, but definitely not least. There would be no Java, no GraalVM without the Self language. Re-implementing the language is a way to pay back to this great pioneer of dynamic compilation.
Join me celebrating Self by forking this repository.
The implementation also includes an experimental parser combinator which is able to speed itself significantly by using Truffle API. To see the difference execute:
SelfGraal$ JAVA_HOME=/jdk1.8.0 mvn install -DSelfGraal.Benchmark=BenchJDK8 2>&1 | grep BenchJDK8
BenchJDK8 took 306 ms on average
SelfGraal$ JAVA_HOME=/graalvm/ mvn install -DSelfGraal.Benchmark=BenchGraalVM 2>&1 | grep BenchGraalVM
BenchGraalVM took 127 ms on average
The parser combinators (seq, alt, rep) compose an AST and use Truffle
constructs (CallTarget, @CompilationFinal, etc.) to optimize it. The parser
is a Truffle language on its own!