[Self-interest] ZigSelf: An implementation of Self in Zig

[Eric Nijakowski]

Hi sin-ack,

I am really impressed by what you're doing and following your progress
with great interest! What you already came up with looks like a very
solid and elegant approach, well done :D

If I'm getting it right you're currently trying to build a monolithic
SELF implementation where the compilation process is implemented in the
part written in Zig. I've seen a similar approach before, and even
though this is an elegant approach for bootstrapping SELF quickly you
might run into some issues if you want to tweak the language later on.
I'd be curious to know how your implementation is going to handle this.
Could a compiler that's written in SELF itself work out for you?

Also, regarding the infamous "loader" and "copy down mechanism": I have
found a few elegant ways to avoid having to copy all the important slots
to the children - they of course diverge a bit from the standard, but
IMO it's a nice way that feels a lot more "SELF-like" and is a lot less
work to implement - if you're interested, I'll be happy to talk to you
about that :)

SELF's really good for message passing, and it's interesting that you're
mentioning Erlang. In my mind, these languages have a lot in common, and
in my last post on this list [1] I was mentioning something similar.
Might be related.

Thanks a lot for letting us know about your project!

Regards,
Eric

  - [1]:
http://lists.selflanguage.org/pipermail/self-interest/2021-December/004908.html