[LLVMdev] Criticism of garbage collection support in LLVM

[Albert Graef]

Chris Lattner wrote:
> Hey, this is incredibly cool. I had never heard of pure, nice work!

Thanks. I only just started to write about it as we're getting close to
version 1.0 now, so you might hear more about it in the future. ;-)

> Would you mind writing a blurb for this page?
> http://llvm.org/ProjectsWithLLVM/

Here goes:

Pure (http://pure-lang.googlecode.com/) is an algebraic/functional
programming language based on term rewriting. Programs are collections
of equations which are used to evaluate expressions in a symbolic
fashion. Pure offers dynamic typing, eager and lazy evaluation, lexical
closures, a hygienic macro system (also based on term rewriting),
built-in list and matrix support (including list and matrix
comprehensions) and an easy-to-use C interface. The interpreter uses
LLVM as a backend to JIT-compile Pure programs to fast native code.

In addition to the usual algebraic data structures, Pure also has
MATLAB-style matrices in order to support numeric computations and
signal processing in an efficient way. Pure is mainly aimed at
mathematical applications right now, but it has been designed as a
general purpose language. The dynamic interpreter environment and the C
interface make it possible to use it as a kind of functional scripting
language for many application areas.

(Please feel free to edit for editorial purposes.)

> That's very nice.  Do you (or anyone else out there that I don't know  
> about :) want to be mentioned in the LLVM 2.5 release notes?

Sure, that would be nice!

> Incidentally, my comment about functional language people hating LLVM  
> wasn't meant as a universal statement.  I'm thrilled that there are  
> people using and liking it, please help spread the good word! :)

Will do. But I think that if there are any compiler writers who haven't
heard about LLVM yet then they must have been hiding under a rock. :)

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr.Graef at t-online.de, ag at muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag