[LLVMdev] 2.2 garbage collector questions

Scott Michel
Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:34:00 -0000

Scott Michel wrote:
> thomas weidner wrote:
>
>>>The reason why I ask is that I expressed an outrageous opinion at
>>>Supercomputing back in November, to wit, that CL is probably the
best
>>>language suited for today's multicore problems... but I
don't have the
>>>time to hack one of the current implementations to proove the point.
>>
>>
>>interesting, what makes lisp superior in this area over languages with
explicit
>>support for parallell computing (like erlang? or Ada) or languages which
may be
>>easier auto parallelized (like haskell because of its functional
nature).
>
>
> Lisp macros make it much easier to "rewrite" the program to both
analyze
> the code and take advantage of certain features. Few, if any, other
> languages have this feature or plan to implement it.

I realize there might be Lisp macro-like packages for other languages,
such as OCaml. Dylan, for all intents and purposes, is A Dead Parrot (as
much as it pains me to say so [*]), but was a good example of how to
take an Algol-like syntax and incorporate Lisp-like macros in the
d-expression paper.

For other languages that feature 'eval', such as Python, the AST is
relatively complex enough that macros may not ever be viable, i.e., that
one could easily perform 'macroexpand-1' before 'eval'.

But this is my own personal opinion. Pile on and disgree!


-scooter