Updated the front page and added post about compiler.

_posts/2011-09-02-compiling-lemma.markdown

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+---
+title: Compiling Lemma
+layout: post
+---
+
+## {{page.title}}
+#### 2 September 2011
+
+I've been occasionally working on a Lemma compiler for the last few weeks.
+I hadn't been planning on starting work on a compiler so soon, but a few
+weeks ago I discovered a very serious bug with the Lemma interpreter: it
+ignores `nil` values altogether. I've been using Lua on and off for about
+seven years and should've known better. The oversight was made very early on
+in the course of developing the interpreter, and fixing it would require a
+major amount of code-rewriting. However, since the interpreter was always
+meant to be a throwaway, I decided to start from (almost) scratch and write a
+compiler.
+
+I decided to leave some room for more mistakes. The compiler I'm working on
+is meant to be a one-off program. The idea is to get it working as quickly
+as possible and see what kinds of compromises need to be made in order to
+compile Lemma. It's a naïve Lemma->Lua translator that does no optimizations.
+As such, the code it generates isn't the best. The goal is to be as much like
+the current Lemma language as possible and focus on Lua interop.
+
+When Lemma was first conceived, I had imagined an eventual compiler that
+could generate Lua bytecode. After spending some time tinkering with the Lua
+internals, it became clear that such an approach would not be feasible. While
+the LVM executes bytecode, the format of the bytecode differs depending on
+the platform. That means that LVM bytecode files are not portable: the
+bytecode files generated on x86 are not quite the same as those generated on
+amd64, for example. The bytecode files contain no information that would
+allow LVMs on different platforms to decipher each other's bytecode.
+
+Recent versions of LuaJIT, on the other hand, do support a portable bytecode.
+This bytecode is portable between different platforms, but is only compatible
+with LuaJIT and not with the official LVM.
+
+The solution to this bytecode fiasco is, of course, to compile to Lua code.
+From there, the bytecode generation can be handled by whatever Lua compiler
+is available. This is less than ideal. Future versions of the compiler may
+have support for multiple compilation targets and programmers could choose
+either Lua code or LuaJIT bytecode.
+
+The current source for the compiler is in `compiler.lma`. It's still a work
+in progress, but it can compile most Lemma expressions. I've created a branch,
+`0.2`, where I will continue work on the compiler. In `0.2`, the interpreter
+in `eval` will be replaced with the compiler paired with `lua/loadstring` to
+do a Lua compile and execute. I hope to get the language more
+feature-complete at this time, and to begin rewriting the Lemma library
+in Lemma itself (fixing bugs along the way). This is also a great opportunity
+to start adding some documentation.
+

index.html

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 ---
 
 <h2>The Periodic Loaf</h2>
-<p>I'm Cory Burgett, a senior in Computer Science at NC State University.
-This is my blog.</p>
-
+<p>I'm Cory Burgett, a recent graduate of the Computer Science program at
+NC State University.  I currently live and work in Washington, D.C. creating
+tools that analyze massive amounts of data to detect fraud.</p>
+<p>I'm a (programming) language junkie.  I spend my spare time learning new
+languages and working on a <a href="http://github.com/baguette/lemma">Lisp
+dialect</a> designed to interoperate with <a href="http://lua.org">Lua</a>.</p>
+<p><a href="http://github.com/baguette">GitHub page</a></p>
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