The Design and Implementation of an Extensible System Meta-Programming Language
Abstract
System programming languages are typically compiled in a linear pipeline process, which is a completely opaque and isolated to end-users. This limits the possibilities of performing meta-programming in the same language and environment, and the extensibility of the compiler itself by end-users. We propose a novel redefinition of the compilation process in terms of interpreting the program definition as a script. This evaluation is performed in an environment where the full compilation pipeline is implemented and exposed to the user via a meta-object protocol, which forms the basis for a meta-circular definition and implementation of the programming language itself. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by bootstrapping a self-compiling implementation of Sysmel, a static and dynamic typed Smalltalk and C++ inspired programming language.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2309.15416,
title = {The Design and Implementation of an Extensible System Meta-Programming Language},
author = {Ronie Salgado},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.15416},
year = {2023}
}