Yet another Kernel interpreter

I wrote another Kernel-ish interpreter in JavaScript: Virtua.

This time, no tail-call optimization or first-class continuations, just plain old pedestrian control flow: LOOP, CATCH, THROW, UNWIND-PROTECT (unexpectedly, this didn't make the interpreter much smaller than the one with TCO and continuations.)

Probably the only interesting thing in there is that everything is fully OOP: EVAL is a message, as is COMBINE, as is MATCH - which means every object can potentially control its own evaluation, act as a combiner, and be used as a left-hand-side pattern in matching.

Again: Kernel is nice and elegant, but the interpretetive overhead of fexprs is killer [Edit: haven't measured it, and see this]. Maybe it doesn't matter for what I want to do: script web GUIs.

Previously: The Kernel Underground.

Virtua subjotting

I'm keeping a quite detailed log of Virtua on the new Subjot service: http://subjot.com/manuel/virtua.

(Subjot is an interesting new microblogging service, where every user has multiple streams, and you can choose which to follow. Here's an invite. I have no affiliation with Subjot.)

The Virtua programming language

Virtua will be my next programming language, with the following core features:

• combined object lambda architecture
• delimited continuations
• fexprs
• plus, of course, all the good stuff we're used to from Lisp: sane syntax, numerical tower, ...

Virtua will be written in JavaScript. The goal is to make Virtua a good command language for interactive, extensible, browser-based applications, like an Emacs for hypermedia.

If you're interested to work with me on Virtua, do get in touch!