EulerLisp

Table of Contents

EulerLisp VM

Source code on Github: l3kn/EulerLisp

I always wanted to create my own programming language.

It might be one of the programming projects with the highest floor-to-ceiling ratio : a simple interpreter can take up less than a hundred lines of code, but adding features and improving the speed quickly increases the complexity, until it reaches the heights of industrial strength compilers like gcc, with millions of lines of code.

At around 7k lines of code this project lies somewhere inbetween (at least on a logarithmic scale).

The language is a Lisp1 modeled after Scheme and runs on a simple bytecode-VM, so that it is possible to write non-trivial programs and have them run at a reasonable speed.

(defn fib (n)
      (if (<= n 1)
          n
          (+ (fib (- n 1))
             (fib (- n 2)))))

(println (fib 30))

Of course this is a pretty meaningless benchmark, but on my machine the recursive fibonacci fuction above takes 1.1s to execute in EulerLisp which gets makes it between 2x and 10x slower than a few other languages I tested:

Ruby, 0.11s
Python, 0.23s
Elixir, 0.48s
Chicken Scheme (interpreted), 0.68s
Chicken Scheme (compiled), 0.07s
C (gcc -O3), 0.08s

Motivation

As an incentive to make the language fast and usable, I'm using it to work through some Project Euler math problems.

Figure 1: Project Euler badge

Up till now, I've solved around 200 of the problems and written around 7k lines of EulerLisp code.

Data Types

The main data type is called Datum and has different variants:

Bool
Integer (64bit signed)
Bignum (multiple precision)
Rational (64bit numerator and denominator)
Float (64bit)
Char
String
Symbol (pointer into a symbol table)
Vector
Builtin (reference to a function implemented in rust)
Closure (reference to a function in the target language)
PriorityQueue (for performance reasons, should be implemented in lisp)
Undefined
Nil

Builtin Functions

Bitwise

(bitwise-and args*)
(bitwise-or args*)
(bitwise-xor args*)
(bitwise-not args)

Comparison

( args*)=, numeric equality
(! a b)=, numeric inequality
(equal? args*) , object equality
(< args*)
(< args*)=
(> args*)
(> args*)=
(min args*)
(max args*)

Lists, Vectors, Pair

(cons a b) , create a pair from a and b
(fst p) , get the first element of a pair
(rst p) , get the second element of a pair
(set-fst! p v) , set the first element of a pair
(set-rst! p v) , set the second element of a pair
(list args*) , create a list, equivalent to (cons arg1 (cons arg2 (cons ... (cons argn '()))))
(list->vector lst)
(permutations lst)
(combinations lst len)
(sort lst)
(uniq lst)
(join str lst)
(vector args*) create a vector
(vector-ref vec i)
(vector-set! vec i v)
(vector-push! vec v)
(vector-pop! vec)
(vector-shuffle! vec)
(vector-delete! vec i)
(vector-length vec)
(vector->list vec)
(make-vector size [initial])
(vector-copy vec [from] [to])

Numbers, Math

(+ args*)
(- arg) , negation
(- args*) , subtraction
(* args*)
(/ args*)
(% a mod)
(div a mod) , integer division
(divmod a mod) , the result is a pair (quotient . remainder)
(powf n e) , ( pow for non-integer exponents)
(sqrt n) ,
(cbrt n) ,
(ln a) , logarithm base
(log2 a) , logarithm base
(log10 a) , logarithm base
(log a base)
(ceil a)
(round a)
(floor a)
(>> a by) , right shift
(<< a by) , left shift
(popcount a) , count the number of s in the binary representation of
(prime? a)
(zero? a)
(number->digits a) , list of the digits of a in reverse order
(digits->number lst)
(number-of-digits a)
(denominator a)
(numerator a)
(sin a) , (cos a) , (tan a)
(asin a) , (atan a) , (acos a)
(atan2 a b) , four quadrant inverse tangent
(radiants a)
(totient a) , (totient-sum a) , and
(modexp b e n) ,
(modular-inverse b n) , inverse of modulo
(extended-euclidian a b) , a list , so that
(prime-factors a) , prime factors of a as a list of pairs (p . e)
(num-prime-factors a) , number of prime factors of a
(primes n) , a list of the first n primes
(rand from to) , random number in

Bignum

(bignum n) , convert n to a bignum
(digits->bignum digits) , create a bignum from a list of digits (in reverse order)
(bignum-chunks bn) , base "digits" of the bignum
(chunks->bignum bn) , create a bignum from a list of chunks

Input / Output

TODO

String

TODO

Types

TODO

Resources

If this inspired you to start building your own programming language, here are some resources that helped me:

Background

The Roots of Lisp

Algorithms & Data Structures

Implementation

Lisp In Small Pieces

Specs

Continuations

Continuations capture the remaining parts of a computation.

The VM maintains the following state components:

val register
fun register
arg1 register
arg2 register
env
env stack
stack
program counter (through a Bytecode struct)
program counter stack (through a Bytecode struct)

call-with-current-continuation (often abbreviated as call/cc ) captures the current evaluation context and turns it into an object that can be called.

(call/cc f) allocates an activation frame, fills it with an object representing the current continuation and then calls the f with this activation frame.

We can ignore the registers, they are not saved in any function call. The program counter can be ignored, too, as it is restored by the RETURN in the body of function f .

Continuation invocation works by restoring the stack, setting val to the value the continuation was called with and then continuing to run the program.

(defn f (cont)
  (cont 2)
  3)

(println (f id))
(println (call/cc f))

   CREATE-CLOSURE 1
   JUMP @510
   PUSH-SHALLOW-ARGUMENT-REF 0
   PUSH-CONSTANT $2
   FUNCTION-INVOKE tail: false, arity: 1
   RESTORE-ENV
   CONSTANT $3
   RETURN
510:
   GLOBAL-SET g322
   // (set! f ...)

   PUSH-CHECKED-GLOBAL-REF println
   PUSH-CHECKED-GLOBAL-REF g322
   PUSH-CHECKED-GLOBAL-REF g236
   FUNCTION-INVOKE tail: false, arity: 1
   // call (f id)
   RESTORE-ENV
   PUSH-VALUE
   FUNCTION-INVOKE tail: false, arity: 1
   // call (println res)
   RESTORE-ENV
   PUSH-CHECKED-GLOBAL-REF println
   CHECKED-GLOBAL-REF g322
   // load `f` closure into val
   CALL-CC
   // call `f` with current continuation as argument
   PUSH-VALUE
   FUNCTION-INVOKE tail: true, arity: 1

When FUNCTION-INVOKE in the closure is called on the continuation,

Backlinks

Implementing Programming Languages
In EulerLisp a lot of the heavy lifting is done by code written in Rust. Once it was powerful enough to solve the first Project Euler, it did not take many more features to implement solutions for the next hundred problems.

If you have an idea how this page could be improved or a comment send me a mail.