zdimension

Quick blogpost about recursion, stack machines, and macros.

As always, all feedback is welcome!

Shameless self-plug: I wrote a [blog post](https://zdimension.fr/crabs-all-the-way-down/) about this, where I talk about implementing an ARM CPU in logic circuits and running code in it

The result of Microsoft developers in the 90s drunkenly making up an object model on top of C with the goal of it being cross-language and cross-platform (in theory). The idea being that you can define an interface and implement it in any language and consume it in any language. A good idea in theory. In practice, DLL hell often made the experience unpleasant. A big part of Windows's APIs are COM-based. For historical reasons it's also used at the core of a few macOS system components, hence the grandparent comment

Seeing code like that reminds me a lot of the J# days, when you basically had a Java 1.1 standard library implemented on top of .NET. I played with it a bit a few years back, even ported an AWT to it (imagine using AWT in C#): https://github.com/zdimension/awt2048_csharp/blob/master/Pro...

> The only superfluous thing I love is the ->, which is much better than the C convention of putting the return type before the function name (IMO).

For what it's worth, C++11 supports that syntax:

    auto thing(int a, bool b) -> string;

New and revamped version of inline-vbs. It originally only supported VBScript, but it's now equipped to support pretty much any Active Scripting engine (though I have to add the CLSIDs by hand).

A Haskell Active Scripting engine is rumored to have existed, but the only thing I could find online is something called HScript, relying on the old Hugs interpreter, and it's not Active Scripting, it's just an unrelated ActiveX component that simulates it in IE.

Emitting assembly code for binary output for easier debugging is a hell of a good idea, I'm gonna steal that one.

Some of the links, funnily, are based on "real" links: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/lp/lectures.html is broken but https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/lp/ is the page for a Logic Programming course.

https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hosking/726/html/prolog_list... is broken, but there are many pages in the format https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hosking/XXX corresponding to courses taught by that guy, but 726 is nonexistent.

Got an old Burroughs C3155 calculator from 1971, fully functional. More reactive than Windows 10's calculator.

Glad you liked it! If you want to learn Lisp, I'd recommend something like Racket (implementation of Scheme, a dialect of Lisp), it's a "batteries included" Lisp that should be easier for a beginner to learn. The built-in code editor (DrRacket) is, eh, good enough.

Thanks! Glad you liked it!

Sorry about that! I'm still trying to find a way to get good support for dark mode with a dynamic dark mode switcher, and it seems that the current one I'm using (from V8 labs) behaves... erratically when JS isn't enabled. I'm working on it!

Thank you so much! Glad you liked it! If you want to learn Rust, check out the book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/) and Rustlings (https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings) (runnable in the browser), both are amazing resources

TIL, I'd never have thought something line gensyn could be possible using C macros (though this is an extension). This is both amazing and horrible

Thank you!

Ah. Indeed, I don't have an FPGA on hand to synthesize all this to real silicon, but it would totally be possible (Digital has support for FPGA synthesis)

I'm sorry, what does HLS mean?

Thanks!

Thanks! Making a whole post on the CPU could be fun, I'll try giving it a shot next week.