Trilogy#

My (approximately) third attempt at building a programming language¹².

Also a programming language that more closely resembles three languages at once than any one single language.

Also an exploration into a bunch of ideas in language theory (or at least my own ideas of them) that I am finding come in sets of three.

That makes a trilogy. Hopefully I produce something useful. Third time's the charm!

Status#

The v0.0 "barely functioning" version of Trilogy was completed in 2023, using a custom bytecode virtual machine. While it did succeed at its original goal, there were numerous flaws with performance, memory usage, and bugs in general.

A v0.1 version is now in the works, backed by LLVM for a more robust and performant implementation and better FFI to native libraries.

• Read some papers and instructions on programming languages
  • https://www.eff-lang.org/handlers-tutorial.pdf
  • http://www.math.bas.bg/bantchev/place/iswim/j-explanation.pdf
  • http://www.math.bas.bg/bantchev/place/iswim/j.pdf
  • https://cs.ru.nl/~dfrumin/notes/delim.html
  • https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/filinski.pdf
  • https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/slindley/papers/effmondel-jfp.pdf
  • https://caml.inria.fr/pub/papers/xleroy-applicative_functors-popl95.pdf
  • https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/
  • https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890540197926432/pdf?md5=30965cec6dd7605a865bbec4076f65e4&pid=1-s2.0-S0890540197926432-main.pdf
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571066115000705/pdf?md5=3b9f68cbe5525034208dfacfb8b0e099&pid=1-s2.0-S1571066115000705-main.pdf
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18920
• Design the language: Check out the spec!
• Read the book
• Specify the language (Living document)
• Implement the language:
  • Scanning
  • Parsing
  • Syntactic analysis
  • Name resolution
  • Bytecode generation
  • Virtual machine
  • Garbage collector
  • LLVM code generation
  • Extensive testing
  • Standard library (in progress)
• Implement the ecosystem
  • Formatter
  • Linter
  • LSP
  • DAP
• Future experimental ideas:
  • Try out IC based VM (HVM)