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The Disciplined Disciple Compiler (DDC)
Disciple is a dialect of Haskell that uses strict evaluation as the default and supports destructive update of arbitrary data structures. Sequencing of effectful computations is achieved via effect typing, instead of with Monads such as ST and IO. Laziness is supported via programmer annotations, and the effect system guarantees that computations with visible side effects are not suspended. Many Haskell programs are also Disciple programs, or will run with minor changes. Our target applications are the ones that you always find yourself writing C programs for, because existing functional languages are too slow, use too much memory, or don't let you update the data that you need to.
DDC is still in the "research prototype" stage, meaning that it will compile programs if you are nice to it, but expect compiler panics and missing features. You'll get panics due to ungraceful handling of errors in the source code, but valid programs should compile ok. Here are some working examples, along with their Disciple source code:
| Ray Tracer | N-Body | Styrene |
| (code) | (code) | (code) |
State of Play
This section records what the DDC developers are actively working on. If you're hacking on something DDC related then by all means add yourself here. Records are dropped off if they're older than about a month.
Ben Lippmeier (benl23) -- updated 23rd October 2010
- I've started a blog on DDC development at http://disciple-devel.blogspot.com/
- I'm currently fixing support for type signatures. Previously we were just using the value portion of the sig, but we need to check effect and closure information as well.
Erik de Castro Lopo (m3ga) -- updated 18th Aug 2010
- Started work on an LLVM backend. The idea is to have a -via-llvm command line option which would then generate object files using LLVM. The LLVM generated object files will be compatible with the object files generated using the C backend for easier debugging. Another goal for the backend is to make it easier to bootstrap the compiler (compile DDC with DDC) and to port the compiler to new platforms and architectures.
- I'm pretty much stalled on all the current bugs and waiting for Ben to finish the refactoring at which time I'll have another crack at them.
- Improvements to DDC's library.
Language
- Language Overview
- Syntactic differences to Haskell
- The Language Definition is still evolving and incomplete.
Installation
Development
- Disciple Development Blog (benl23 + just ask)
- Erik's DDC Blog (m3ga)
- Compiler Commentary
- Development Builds
- Build Bots and Servers
- Building the Code documentation
- Syntax Highlighting
- Coding Conventions
- Using Darcs
- Debugging Help
- Memory and CPU Usage Profiling
- Making Patches
How you can help
- Download the compiler, write programs, and file bug reports!
- Write more tests. Cute graphical demos are especially fun.
- Fix bugs! The ones on the newbie list should be easy to get started on, otherwise we're pushing for the 0.1.3 release
- 'port across GHC base libraries like Data.Either and Data.Map.
How to get help
- Send mail to disciple-cafe at Google Groups.
- Ask in the #disciplined channel on the freenode IRC network.
Further Reading
- Ben's academic webpage
- Witnessing Mutability, Purity and Aliasing for Program Optimisation, submitted to JFP 2010
- Type Inference and Optimisation for an Impure World, ANU 2010 (PhD thesis)
- Witnessing Purity, Constancy and Mutability, slides, APLAS 2009
