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Maru's architecture

Maru's architecture is described in Ian Piumarta's paper: Open, extensible composition models.

it is a sketch of how Maru's generalised eval works, which is entirely accurate in intent and approach, if a little different in some implementation details (Ian Piumarta)

The Parts - an overview

  • eval.c (in branch maru.0.c99) contains a reader and evaluator (interpreter) for an s-expression language, written in C (C99).

  • eval.l (in branch maru.1 and up) contains the same evaluator, written in (a subset of) this s-expression language that can be compiled to machine code. In other words, eval.l implements a metacircular evaluator for the language it is written in.

  • emit.l contains a compiler from s-expressions to IA-32 (x86) assembly (and LLVM IR), written in the s-expression language. This compiler can be thought of as a semantics-preserving "level shift" from s-expressions to machine code, letting the metacircular evaluator in eval.l escape from the "infinite metacircular regression" to a language grounded in hardware. A possible metaphor of this is a "target universe" implemented by some electric circuits (i.e. transistors wired to each other in a CPU) that provide you a set of axiomatic foundations to build upon while compiling the abstract to the concrete; while implementing your new universe (the Maru language in this case). More details are available in the compiler's doc.

  • boot.l contains some basic data structures, algorithms, and paradigms that are needed by emit.l; it's written in the s-expression language.