Re:Nim vs. Crystal
by ezrast on Thursday December 26, 2019 @04:06PM
(#21886776)
> The whole promise of LLVM is that your prog-lang just targets LLVM (so to speak) and doesn't have to worry about specific platforms.
"Platform" in this case mostly means executable format. LLVM is too low-level to be able to abstract away operating system features.
The hard part of porting a project like Crystal isn't generating a valid binary (since LLVM does handle that part well), it's adapting the standard library for dealing with all the places where Windows and POSIX offer different interfaces to userspace - stuff like filesystem semantics, networking behavior, and threading where the system calls can't always be translated in a straightforward way.
"Platform" in this case mostly means executable format. LLVM is too low-level to be able to abstract away operating system features.
The hard part of porting a project like Crystal isn't generating a valid binary (since LLVM does handle that part well), it's adapting the standard library for dealing with all the places where Windows and POSIX offer different interfaces to userspace - stuff like filesystem semantics, networking behavior, and threading where the system calls can't always be translated in a straightforward way.