In my previous post cleaning up the parser, I had rationalised the parser for my custom language I’m calling Neil - Not Exactly an Intermediate Language. The next step in making my language more useful and expression is to add the ability to arbitrarily create variables within a function, store an initial value to the variable, and then be able to update the variable. Previously, our language could handle: Whereas now we want it to be able to handle:

I was recently made aware of the awesome JSON parser/writer benchmark suite nativejson-benchmark (thanks to the awesome @chadaustin). The suite takes over 40 different JSON libraries and compares how fast the can parse/write JSON, but also has a set of test cases that cover some really obtuse corner cases that a lot of parsers missed. One of the parsers that failed some of these tests was my own one json.h, so in pull request #42 I’ve merged in the fixes for the failures uncovered by the test suite.

In my previous post Hooking up MPC & LLVM I had started hooking up MPC to LLVM, to start developing a custom language I’m calling Neil - Not Exactly an Intermediate Language. Since then, I’ve tried to rationalise the various hacks I had to do on the original version just to get something working, and actually try and have a clean codebase for generating LLVM from our MPC grammar. Check out the GitHub repository here if you want to follow the progress.

I’ve been tinkering around with mpc and llvm recently - just to satisfy a few simple questions: How easy is it to use mpc? How easy is the LLVM c api to use? How easy is it to connect a parser generator to an LLVM Module? So given the above aims, I’ve embarked on creating my own stupid little language, that I’m calling ‘neil‘ - Not Exactly an Intermediate Language. It is utterly by chance that the name ‘neil‘ happens to be my own name, if you’ve believe that gratuitous lie!

With all the buzz surrounding Vulkan and its ability to make graphics more shiny/pretty/fast, there is one key thing seems to have been lost in the ether of information - Vulkan isn’t just a graphics API, it supports compute too! Quoting the specification (bold added for effect): Vulkan is an API (Application Programming Interface) for graphics and compute hardware And: This specification defines four types of functionality that queues may support: graphics, compute, transfer, and sparse memory management.