When using Zig functions and structs on the low side there are some nice opportunities for making the low/high interface more automatic at comptime, especially when you're jointly compiling (your Zig code + a Zig-based Python interpreter + your Python code) together into one WASM blob.
Disclaimer/public-commitment-to-getting-it-released: I've written most of a Python interpreter in Zig as part of another project. (just the basics — won't be big and professional like CPython.) I'll reply here eventually when it's done, available as FLOSS, and ready to say "high-low".
Re:Has there ever been an attempt to create a high/low level...
by DanielHB on Friday January 26, 2024 @04:22AM
(#39140471)
ABIs are not enough, it is a huge pain in the ass to setup the function invocations, especially cross-platform. Having separate compiling and linking steps for each part of the codebase and stuff is a huge pain.
I think Bun (NodeJS-compatible runtime) was planning to add native support for importing C and Zig code directly from JS with typescript codegen. But even that is still a bit meh, you also need some data-exchange format so you can pass complex data structures without paying a serialisation/deserialisation cost.
Re:Has there ever been an attempt to create a high/low level...
by Qem on Thursday January 25, 2024 @09:24PM
(#39138244)
Was going to mention Smalltalk/Slang and PyPy/RPython, pleased to see people already pointed them.
There was even a Smalltalk implemented using RPython, but unfortunately that project seems not to be active. Last change 5 years ago: https://github.com/hpi-swa/RSqueak
https://docs.python.org/3/extending/extending.html
https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v20.x/docs/api/n-api.html#nod...
https://docs.python.org/3/library/ctypes.html
https://swig.org
When using Zig functions and structs on the low side there are some nice opportunities for making the low/high interface more automatic at comptime, especially when you're jointly compiling (your Zig code + a Zig-based Python interpreter + your Python code) together into one WASM blob.
Disclaimer/public-commitment-to-getting-it-released: I've written most of a Python interpreter in Zig as part of another project. (just the basics — won't be big and professional like CPython.) I'll reply here eventually when it's done, available as FLOSS, and ready to say "high-low".
I think Bun (NodeJS-compatible runtime) was planning to add native support for importing C and Zig code directly from JS with typescript codegen. But even that is still a bit meh, you also need some data-exchange format so you can pass complex data structures without paying a serialisation/deserialisation cost.
There was even a Smalltalk implemented using RPython, but unfortunately that project seems not to be active. Last change 5 years ago: https://github.com/hpi-swa/RSqueak
other languages ended up adding this (can't remember the name) depending on their niche, because one always hit performance issue