compiler design

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Adding Go's Defer to the TypeScript Compiler
2 months ago
- The author attempted to add Go's defer statement to the TypeScript compiler to enable delayed function execution for cleanup.
- The implementation transforms AST with a stack of closures, capturing callee, receiver, and arguments immediately, and running them in reverse order on function exit.
- Error handling uses AggregateError to combine multiple exceptions, unlike Go's value-based errors.
- The author concludes that defer does not fit well in TypeScript due to differences in error handling (exceptions vs. values) and async complexity.
- The ECMAScript Explicit Resource Management proposal (using/disposable) is suggested as a better alternative for resource cleanup.
Rewriting the Futhark Type Checker
2 months ago
- The Futhark type checker originally had a simple design with scalars, arrays, tuples, first-order monomorphic functions, and no type inference, but already included uniqueness types for in-place updates.
- As features like records, modules, higher-order functions, Hindley-Milner inference, and size types were added, the single-pass type checker became increasingly complex and hard to maintain.
- The type checker was eventually split into multiple phases: name resolution, alias checking (post-type-checking), and a core term type checker.
- A new constraint-based unsized type checker was introduced to handle complex features like AUTOMAP, generating constraints solved offline rather than on the fly.
- The current new type checker performs four stages per function: name resolution, unsized type checking (ground types), size inference, and in-place update violation checking.
- This layered design improves error messages by providing full information from previous stages and allows moving many checks into separate passes after main type checking.
- Despite potential inefficiency from multiple passes, optimizations have resulted in a slight speedup (~4%) compared to the old single-pass checker.
- The type checker also now supports recursion via an environment variable, though that is a separate topic.
Show HN: Phobos – A tiny scale-free kernel language with tile-DAG support
2 months ago
- The author developed Phobos, a tiny kernel language inspired by Triton that compiles to PTX and runs on NVIDIA GPUs.
- Phobos achieves about 76% of cuBLAS SGEMM performance on an RTX 2080 SUPER, with optimizations like tiling and tensor core usage.
- The language abstracts thread-level details, focusing on tile-level operations for AI computations, enabling natural scaling to distributed clusters.
- The project involved learning low-level GPU programming, using MLIR and LLVM with Rust, and implementing autotuning for kernel parameters.
- A cluster prototype was built for distributed tile-DAG execution, though multi-node benchmarks were not performed due to hardware limitations.

compiler design

Adding Go's Defer to the TypeScript Compiler

Rewriting the Futhark Type Checker

Show HN: Phobos – A tiny scale-free kernel language with tile-DAG support