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Purr's Design

As a platform:

  • Modules describe in which language they're written;
  • Modules may provide a language implementation;
  • Language implementations compile to Core (using AST objects directly);
  • Core has two backends: CoreVM, a live VM with a JIT; and Core2JS, an optimising AOT compiler with PGO.
  • IDE uses CoreVM as a service (CoreVM allows hot-patching and querying runtime information);

(maybe) surprising design decisions

No reflection. If you're familiar with Smalltalk and Lisp environments, "no reflection" may be a bit odd. Purr does have reflection (mirror-based), but only as a part of the IDE service. IDE/VM plugins can query and modify live runtime information. This is a VM-specific format, which is not exactly Core semantics. Reflection (and other stuff) are gated through OCS.

For meta-programming, instead of reflection, people just write whole new programming languages. So they must write at least a parser and compiler (though those can be an extension of an existing language, details are still not decided on this yet).