The Dolorem Pattern: Growing a Language Through Compile-Time Function Execution (Pearl/Brave New Idea)

Henniger, Simon; Amin, Nada

doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.41

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Document Identifiers

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.41
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-182343

Author Details

Simon Henniger

Technische Universität München, Germany

Nada Amin

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Acknowledgements

We thank Michael Ballantyne, Will Byrd, Anastasiya Kravchuk-Kirilyuk, and Cameron Wong for discussions about this work and feedback on drafts. We also thank anonymous reviewers for the insights and feedback.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Simon Henniger and Nada Amin. The Dolorem Pattern: Growing a Language Through Compile-Time Function Execution (Pearl/Brave New Idea). In 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 263, pp. 41:1-41:27, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.41

Abstract

Programming languages are often designed as static, monolithic units. As a result, they are inflexible. We show a new mechanism of programming language design that allows to more flexible languages: by using compile-time function execution and metaprogramming, we implement a language mostly in itself. Our approach is usable for creating feature-rich, yet low-overhead system programming languages. We illustrate it on two systems, one that lowers to C and one that lowers to LLVM.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification

Software and its engineering → Compilers
Software and its engineering → Language features

Keywords

extensible languages
meta programming
macros
program generation
compilation

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