Saturday, May 6, 2017

So for future's sake

Well great. So, what to do? I have an eager combinator evaluation system. What do you naively need to make it mobile:

  1. The term being reduced (elsewhere) must be transportable, and
  2. the combinators it invokes must be transportable. Moreover, 
  3. the end-result is a term which must be transported back.
The term is a tree of combinators not referencing anything else (if I got the invariants right), so that just needs a means of serialization.

A combinator naively is just a piece of code, so when you're able to serialize that you're halfway there. The other half is that combinators might reference other combinators but that's easy to solve with standard compiler technology. A combinator can be described as a self-contained piece of code referencing external symbols and all you need to do is sweep, ship, and link.

Problem solved, right? However: Verbose, computationally intense, might end up sweeping the entire program, possibly too fine-grained in that you need to gather and link myriads of combinators, doesn't solve distributed scheduling and coordination let alone local exceptions..

And then there's the stuff I didn't think of yet.

Worst case: I manage to corrupt a perfectly fine small language in such a way that it becomes unusable both for stand-alone or distributed computing.

So. Cheers.

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