I'm not surprised to see that Jank's solution to this is to embed LLVM into their runtime. I really wish there was a better way to do this.
There are a lot of things I don't like about C++, and close to the top of the list is the lack of standardization for name-mangling, or even a way mangle or de-mangle names at compile-time. Sepples is a royal pain in the ass to target for a dynamic FFI because of that. It would be really nice to have some way to get symbol names and calling semantics as constexpr const char* and not have to deal with generating (or writing) a ton of boilerplate and extern "C" blocks.
It's absolutely possible, but it's not low-hanging fruit so the standards committee will never put it in. Just like they'll never add a standardized equivalent for alloca/VLAs. We're not allowed to have basic, useful things. Only more ways to abuse type deduction. Will C++26 finally give us constexpr dynamic allocations? Will compilers ever actually implement one of the three (3) compile-time reflection standards? Stay tuned to find out!
Carmack did very much almost exactly the same with the Trinity / Quake3 Engine: IIRC it was LCC, maybe tcc, one of the C compilers you can actually understand totally as an individual.
He compiled C with some builtins for syscalls, and then translated that to his own stack machine. But, he also had a target for native DLLs, so same safe syscall interface, but they can segv so you have to trust them.
Crazy to think that in one computer program (that still reads better than high-concept FAANG C++ from elite lehends, truly unique) this wasn't even the most dramatic innovation. It was the third* most dramatic revolution in one program.
If you're into this stuff, call in sick and read the plan files all day. Gives me googebumps.
Carmack actually deserves the moniker of 10x engineer. Truly his work in his domain has reached far outside it because id the quality of his ideas and methodologies
I have a bit I do where I do Carmack's voice in a fictional interview that goes something like this:
Lex Fridman: So of all the code you've written, is there any that you particularly like?
Carmack: I think the vertex groodlizer from Quake is probably the code I'm most proud of. See, it turns out that the Pentium takes a few cycles too long to render each frame and fails to hit its timing window unless the vertices are packed in canonically groodlized format. So I took a weekend, 16-hour days, and just read the relevant papers and implemented it in code over that weekend, and it basically saved the whole game.
The point being that not only is he a genius, but he also has an insane grindset that allows him to talk about doing something incredibly arcane and complex over a weekend -- devoting all his time to it -- the way you and I talk about breakfast.
I like this word, 'grindset'
Any particular year?
Quake III Arena was released in 1999. It was open-sourced in 2005.
https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_3
(from the source release you can see benreesman remembered right: it was lcc)
Linking directly to C++ is truly hell just considering symbol mangling. The syntax <-> semantics relationship is ghastly. I haven't seen a single project tackle the C++ interface in its entirety (outside of clang). It nearly seems impossible.
There's a reason Carmack tackled the C abi and not whatever the C++ equivalent is.
There is no C ABI (windows compilers do things quite differently from linux ones, etc) and there is no certainly no C++ equivalent.
C ABI is the system V abi for Unix, since C was literally created for it. And that is the abi followed by pretty much any Unix successor: Linux, Apple's OS, FreeBSD.
Windows has its own ABI.
The different abi is pretty much legacy and the fact that x86_64 ABI was built by AMD + Linux etc, while Microsoft worked with Intel for the Itanium abi.
> windows compilers do things quite differently from linux ones, etc
Fuck windows lmao. If windows wanted to be included they would have made different decisions 30 years ago. They can still make an effort.
Until then: fuckem, who cares, who would bother make an effort to care? simple apps can target the web; the rest of us can target vaguely-unix systems.
Just parsing C++ is already a freaking hell.
It's no wonder that every other day a new mini C compiler drops in, while no one even attempts to parse C++.
There is one pretty serious C++ parser project: https://github.com/robertoraggi/cplusplus
Wow, thanks! I didn't know this project.
To parse C++ you need to perform typecheck and name resolution at the same time. And C++ is pretty complex so it's not a easy task.
I hear you when it comes to C++ portability, ABI, and standards. I'm not sure what you would imagine jank using if not for LLVM, though.
Clojure uses the JVM, jank uses LLVM. I imagine we'd need _something_ to handle the JIT runtime, as well as jank's compiler back-end (for IR optimization and target codegen). If it's not LLVM, jank would embed something else.
Having to build both of these things myself would make an already gargantuan project insurmountable.
> the lack of standardization for name-mangling, or even a way mangle or de-mangle names at compile-time.
Like many things, this isn't a C++ problem. There is a standard and almost every target uses it ... and then there's what Microsoft does. Only if you have to deal with the latter is there a problem.
Now, standards do evolve, and this does give room for different system libraries/tools to have a different view of what is acceptable/correct (I still have nightmares of trying to work through `I...E` vs `J...E` errors) ... but all the functionality does exist and work well if you aren't on the bleeding edge (fortunately, C++11 provided the bits that are truly essential; everything since has been merely nice-to-have).
Like many things people claim "isn't a C++ problem but an implementation problem"... This is a C++ problem. Anything that's not nailed down by the standard should be expected to vary between implementations.
The fact that the standard doesn't specify a name mangling scheme leads to the completely predictable result that different implementations use different name mangling schemes.
The fact that the standard doesn't specify a mechanism to mangle and demangle names (be it at runtime or at compile time) leads to the completely predictable result that different implementations provide different mechanisms to mangle and demangle names, and that some implementations don't provide such a mechanism.
These issues could, and should, have been fixed in the only place they can be fixed -- the standard. ISO is the mechanism through which different implementation vendors collaborate and find common solutions to problems.
> The fact that the standard doesn't specify a name mangling scheme leads to the completely predictable result that different implementations use different name mangling schemes.
The ABI mess predates the standard by years and if we look that far back the Annotated C++ Reference Manual included a scheme in its description of the language. Many compiler writers back then made the intentional choice to ignore it. The modern day ISO standard would not fare any better at pushing that onto unwilling compiler writers than it fared with the c++03 export feature.
Well yeah, it can't be fixed now. It could have been specified near the beginning of the life of the language though, and the standard would've been the right place to do that.
I'm saying that the non-standard name mangling is a problem with C++. I'm not saying that it's an easily solvable problem.
> Anything that's not nailed down by the standard should be expected to vary between implementations.
When you have one implementations you have a standard. When you have two implementations and a standard you don’t actually have a standard in practice. You just have two implementations that kind of work similarly in most cases.
While the major compilers do a fantastic job they still frequently disagree about even “well defined” behavior because the standard was interpreted differently or different decisions were made.
> When you have two implementations and a standard you don’t actually have a standard in practice
This simply isn't true. Plenty of standardized things are interchangeable, from internet RFCs followed by zillions of players and implementations of various RFCs, medical device standards, encryption standards, weights and measures, currency codes, country codes, time zones, date and time formats, tons of file formats, compression standards, the ISO 9000 series, ASCII, testing standards, and on and on.
The poster above you is absolutely correct - if something is not in the standard, it can vary.
Lots of things have standards that are mostly interchangeable. But pretending like the implementations don't interpret standards differently and have important differences is naiive. This is doubly so for language implementations which frequently leave things as "implementation defined". Clang and GCC have intentionally made significant efforts to minimize their differences which is why it's less noticeable if you're just swapping between them (it didn't start out this way). MSVC has not made these efforts. Intel abandoned their compiler for Clang. So basically you already have MSVC & clang/GCC as dialects, ignoring more minor differences that readily exist between clang and GCC.
Compare this with languages like Zig, Rust, and Python that have 1 compiler and doesn't have any of the problems of C++ in terms of interop and not having dialects.
Java is the closest to C++ here but even there it's 1 reference implementation (OpenJDK that Oracle derives their release from) and a bunch of smaller implementations that everyone derives from. Java is aided here by the fact that the JDK code itself is shared between JVMs, the language itself is a very thin translation of code --> byte code, and the language is largely unchanging. JavaScript is also in a similar boat but they're aided by the same thing as Java - the language is super thin and has almost nothing in it with everything else deferred as browser APIs where there is this dialect problem despite the existence of standards.
If you have an area where the standard is ambiguous about its requirements, then you have a bug in the standard. And hopefully you also have a report to send along to help it communicate itself more clearly.
This is like getting mad at ISO 8601 because it doesn't define the metric system.
No standard stands alone in its own universe; complementary standards must necessarily always exist.
Besides, even if the C++ standard suddenly did incorporate ABI standards by reference, Microsoft would just refuse to follow them, and nothing would actually be improved.
A better situation than today would be only having to deal with Microsoft and Not Microsoft, rather than multiple different ways of handling the problem that can differ unexpectedly
> There is a standard and almost every target uses it ... and then there's what Microsoft does. Only if you have to deal with the latter is there a problem.
Sounds like there isn't a standard, then.
> the lack of standardization for name-mangling
I don't see the point of standardizing name mangling. Imagine there is a standard, now you need to standardize the memory layout of every single class found in the standard library. Without that, instead of failing at link-time, your hypothetical program would break in ugly ways while running because eg two functions that invoke one other have differing opinions about where exactly the length of a std::string can be found in the memory.
The naive way wouldn't be any different than what it's like to dynamically load sepples binaries right now.
The real way, and the way befitting the role of the standards committee is actually putting effort into standardizing a way to talk to and understand the interfaces and structure of a C++ binary at load-time. That's exactly what linking is for. It should be the responsibility of the software using the FFI to move it's own code around and adjust it to conform with information provided by the main program as part of the dynamic linking/loading process... which is already what it's doing. You can mitigate a lot of the edge cases by making interaction outside of this standard interface as undefined behavior.
The canonical way to do your example is to get the address of std::string::length() and ask how to appropriately call it (to pass "this, for example.)
> LLVM into their runtime
they're not embedding LLVM - they're embedding clang. if you look at my comment below, you'll see LLVM is not currently sufficient.
> [C++] is a royal pain in the ass to target for a dynamic FFI because of that
name mangling is by the easiest part of cpp FFI - the hard part is the rest of the ABI. anyone curious can start here
To be fair, jank embeds both Clang and LLVM. We use Clang for C++ interop and JIT C++ compilation. We use LLVM for IR generation and jank's compiler back-end.
> they're not embedding LLVM - they're embedding clang
They're embedding both, according to the article. But it's also just sloppy semantics on my part; when I say LLVM, I don't make a distinction of the frontend or any other part of it. I'm fully relying on context to include all relevant bits of software being used. In the same way I might use "Windows" to refer to any part of the Windows operating system like dwm.exe, explorer.exe, command.com, ps.exe, etc. LLVM a generic catch-all for me, I don't say "LLI" I say "the LLVM VM", for example. I can't really consider clang to be distinct from that ecosystem, though I know it's a discrete piece of software.
> name mangling is by the easiest part of cpp FFI
And it still requires a lot of work, and increases in effort when you have multiple compilers, and if you're on a tiny code team that's already understaffed, it's not really something you can worry about.
https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Visual_C%2B%2B_name_mangli...
You're right, writing platform specific code to handle this is more than possible. But it takes manhours that might just be better spent elsewhere. And that's before we get to the part where embedding a C++ compiler is extremely inappropriate when you just want a symbol name and an ABI.
But this is besides the point: The fact that it's not a problem solved by the gargantuan standard is awful. I also consider the ABI to be the exact same issue, that being absolutely awful support of runtime code loading, linking and interoperation. There's also no real reason for it, other than the standards committee being incompetent.
> de-mangle names at compile-time
Far from being standardized but it's possible today on GCC and Clang. You just abuse __PRETTY_FUNCTION__.
That's not demangling a mangled name, it's retrieving the unmangled name of a symbol.
Ok so jank is Clojure but with C++/LLVM runtime rather than JVM. So already all of its types are C++ types, that presumably makes things a lot easier. Basically it just uses libclang / CppInterOp to get the corresponding LLVM types and then emits a function call. https://github.com/jank-lang/jank/blob/interop/compiler%2Bru...
From two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44482273
Recently I tried D lang and was surprise with the nice interop with C++ (the language in general feels pretty good), Carbon is nowhere to be seen and havent tried Swift's yet. I hope this is a good one.
Now ofc jank already has gotten C++ support but if I may ask, if it had, let's say gotten D lang support, then would that have been easier/more doable/practical?
Shedskin lang has excellent integration with C++.
shedskin isn't actively developed ... or at least it wasn't for like 10 years https://github.com/shedskin/shedskin/graphs/contributors
It suddenly sprung to life and gained Python 3 compatilibity, which makes it much more interesting than before despite it's ten year hiatus in Python 2 land.
A long long time ago, at ClojureConj 2014, I asked Rich Hickey whether a cpp-based clojure was possible, and his answer was "well, the primary impediment there is a lack of a garbage collector". There were a lot of conversations going on at the same time, so I didn't get an opportunity to "delve" into it, but:
1. does that objection make sense? 2. How does jank approach that hurdle.
It's the first section in the article -
"I have implemented manual memory management via cpp/new and cpp/delete. This uses jank's GC allocator (currently bdwgc), rather than malloc, so using cpp/delete isn't generally needed. However, if cpp/delete is used then memory collection can be eager and more deterministic.
The implementation has full bdwgc support for destructors as well, so both manual deletion and automatic collection will trigger non-trivial destructors."
A GC is nowhere near the most difficult part of this. In 2014, there was no viable technology for JIT compiling C++, and very little technology for JIT compiling native code in general.
In the artical - it garbage collects always but if you call delete the garbage collector will be more agressive about cleaning that up.
That's great! Interop with C++ is such a complex task. Congratss on your work! It's definitely not an easy thing.
I've always wondered what is the best way to interact with C++ template instantiation while keeping performance.
For a static language, you'd probably need to translate your types to C++ during compilation, ask Clang/GCC/MSVC to compile the generated C++ file, and then link the final result.
And finally, pray to the computer gods that name mangiling was done right.
Neat project, I can only marvel at your ability to deal with such madness. But it would be nice to have better C++ interop in higher level languages, there's some useful C++ code out there. I also appreciate the brief mention of Clasp, as I was immediately thinking of it as I was reading through.
I used Clojure back in the day and use Nim at work these days. Linking in to C is trivially easy in Nim. Happy to see this working for jank, but C++ is...such a nightmare target.
Any chance of Jank eventually settling on reference counting? It checks so many boxes in my book: Simple, predictable, few edge cases, fast. I guess it really just depends on how much jank programs thrash memory, I remember Clojure having a lot of background churn.
I started with reference counting, but the amount of garbage Clojure programs churn out ends up bogging everything down unless a GC is used. jank's GC will change, going forward, and I want jank to grow to support optional affine typing, but the Clojure base is likely always going to be garbage collected.
i commented on reddit (and got promptly downvoted) but since i think jank's author is around here (and hopefully is receptive to constructive criticism): the CppInterOp approach to cpp interop is completely janky (no pun intended). the approach literally string munges cpp and then parses/interprets it to emit ABI compliant calls. there's no reason to do this except that libclang currently doesn't support any other way. that's not jank's fault but it could be "fixed" in libclang. at a minimum you could use https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/clang/lib/Cod... to emit the code based on clang ast. at a maximum would be to use something like
https://github.com/Mr-Anyone/abi
or this if/when it comes to fruition
https://discourse.llvm.org/t/llvm-introduce-an-abi-lowering-...
to generate ABI compliant calls/etc for cpp libs.
note, i say all this with maximum love in my heart for a language that would have first class cpp interop - i would immediately become jank's biggest proponent/user if its cpp interop were robust.
EDIT: for people wanting/needing receipts, you can skim through https://github.com/compiler-research/CppInterOp/blob/main/li...
Hey! I'm here and receptive.
I completely agree that Clang could solve this by actually supporting my use case. Unfortunately, Clang is very much designed for standalone AOT compilation, not intertwined with another IR generating mechanism. Furthermore, Clang struggles to handle some errors gracefully which can get it into a bad state.
I have grown jank's fork of CppInterOp quite significantly, in the past quarter, with the full change list being here: https://gist.github.com/jeaye/f6517e52f1b2331d294caed70119f1... Hoping to get all of this upstreamed, but it's a lot of work that is not high priority for me right now.
I think, based on my experience in the guts of CppInterOp, that the largest issue is not the C++ code generation. Basically any code generation is some form of string building. You linked to a part of CppInterOp which is constructing C++ functions. What's _actually_ wrong with that, in terms of robustness? The strings are generated not based on arbitrary user input, but based on Clang QualTypes and Decls. i.e. you need valid Clang values to actually get there anyway. Given that the ABI situation is an absolute mess, and that jank is already using Clang's JIT C++ compiler, I think this is a very viable solution.
However, in terms of robustness, I go back to Clang's error handling, lack of grace, and poor tooling for use cases like this. Based on my experience, _that_ is what will cause robustness issues.
Please don't take my response as unreceptive or defensive. I really do appreciate the discussion and if I'm saying something wrong, or if you want to explain further, please do. For alternatives, you linked to https://github.com/Mr-Anyone/abi which is 3 months old and has 0 stars (and so I assume 0 users and 0 years of battle testing). You also linked to https://discourse.llvm.org/t/llvm-introduce-an-abi-lowering-... which I agree would be great, _if/when it becomes available_.
So, out of all of the options, I'll ask clearly and sincerely: is there really a _better_ option which exists today?
CppInterOp is an implementation detail of jank. If we can replace C++ string generation with more IR generation and a portable ABI mechanism, _and_ if Clang can provide the sufficient libraries to make it so that I don't need to rely on C++ strings to be certain that my template specializations get the correct instantiation, I am definitely open to replacing CppInterOp. From all I've seen, we're not there yet.
I think that some packages that generate Python bindings for C++ use Clang to do it as well.
> which is 3 months old and has 0 stars (and so I assume 0 users and 0 years of battle testing)
ah my bad i meant to link to this one https://github.com/scrossuk/llvm-abi
which inspired the gsoc.
> is there really a _better_ option which exists today?
today the "best in class" approach is swift's which fully (well tries to) model cpp AST and do what i suggested (emitting code directly):
https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/blob/c09135b8f30c0cec8f5f...
There are upsides to this approach. Coupling Swift's AST with Clang's AST will allow for the best codgen, for sure.
However, the huge downside to this approach, which cannot be overlooked, is that Clang (not libclang) is not designed to be a library. It doesn't have the backward compatibility of a library. Swift (i.e. Apple) is already deep into developing Clang, and so I'm sure they can afford the cost of keeping up with the breaking changes that happen on every Clang release. For a solo dev, I'm not yet sure this is actually viable, but I will give it more consideration.
However, I think that raising alarms at C++ codegen is unwarranted. As I said before, basically any query builder or codegen takes some form of string generation. The way we make those safe is to add types in front of them, so we're not just formatting user strings into other strings. That's exactly what CppInterOp does, where the types added are Clang QualTypes and Decls.
You right. Always good to remember that Apple was and still is the main company behind LLVM.
Swift was built and its maintained by the same time that worked in LLVM.
And also, Swift has its own fork of LLVM and LLVM has built-in a lot of features designed for swift like calling convention and async transformation.
The amount of features swift has and is releasing at the same time it has its own LLVM version is just not a thing you can do without a lot of money and years of accumulated expertise.
> For a solo dev, I'm not yet sure this is actually viable, but I will give it more consideration.
look i'm not trying to shit on your project - i promise - i know calling you out like this publically almost requires a political kind of response (i probably shouldn't have done it). i agree with you that as a solo dev you can't (shouldn't) solve this problem - you have enough on your plate making jank great for your core users (who probably don't really care about cpp).
> As I said before, basically any query builder or codegen takes some form of string generation.
i mean this is a tautology on the level of "everything can be represented as strings". yes that's true but types (as you mention are important) and all i'm arguing is that it's much more robust to start with types and end with types instead of starting with strings and ending with types.
anyway you don't need to keep addressing my complaints - you have enough on your plate.
> the CppInterOp approach to cpp interop is completely janky (no pun intended). the approach literally string munges cpp and then parses/interprets it to emit ABI compliant calls.
So, I agree that this sounds janky as heck. My question is: besides sounding janky as heck, is there something wrong with this? Is it slow/unreliable?
i mean it's as prone to error as any other thing that relies on string munging. it's probably not that much slower than the alternative i proposed - because the trampolines/wrappers are jitted and then reused - but it's just not robust enough that i would ever imagine building a prod system on top of it (eg using cppyy in prod) let alone baking it into my language/runtime.
> i mean it's as prone to error as any other thing that relies on string munging.
This is misleading. Having done a great deal of both (as jank also supports C++ codegen as an alternative to IR), if the input is a fully analyzed AST, generating IR is significantly more error prone than generating C++. Why? Well, C++ is statically typed and one can enable warnings and errors for all sorts of issues. LLVM IR has a verifier, but it doesn't check that much. Handling references, pointers, closures, ABI issues, and so many more things ends up being a huge effort for IR.
For example, want to access the `foo.bar` member of a struct? In IR, you'll need to access foo, which may require loading it if it's a reference. You'll need to calculate the offset to `bar`, using GEP. You'll need to then determine if you're returning a reference to `bar` or if a copy is happening. Referencing will require storing a pointer, whereas copying may involve a lot more code. If we're generating C++, though, we just take `foo` and add a `.bar`. The C++ compiler handles the rest and will tell us if we messed anything up.
If you're going to hand wave and say anything that's building strings is error prone and unsafe, regardless of how richly typed and thoroughly analyzed the input is, the stance feels much less genuine.
The delta between the title and the content gave me extreme pause, thanks for sharing that there's, uh, worse problems.
I'm a bit surprised I've seen two articles about jank here the last 2 days if these are exemplars of the technical approach and communication style. Seems like that wouldn't be enough to get on people's radars.
Which particular delta between the title and the content gave you extreme pause?
It said "jank is C++", which I assumed would be explaining that jank compiles down to C++ or something similar, i.e. there is a layer of abstraction between jank and C++, but it effectively "works like" C++.
On re-read, I recognize where it is used in the article:
"jank is C++. There is no runtime reflection, no guess work, and no hints. If the compiler can't find a member, or a function, or a particular overload, you will get a compiler error."
I assume other interop scenarios don't pull this off*, thus it is distinctive. Additionally, I'm not at all familiar with Clojure, sadly, but it also sounds like there's some special qualities there ("I think that this is an interesting way to start thinking about jank, Clojure, and static types")
Now I'll riff and just write out the first 3-5 titles that come to mind with that limited understanding:
- Implementing compile-time verifiable C++ interop in jank
- Sparks of C++ interop: jank, Clojure, & verifying interop before runtime
- jank's progress on C++ interop
- Safe C++ interop lessons from jank
* for example, I write a lot of Dart day to day and rely on Dart's "FFI" implementation to call C++, which now that I'm thinking about, only works because there's a code generator that creates "Dart headers" (my term) for the C++ libraries. I could totally footgun and call arbitrary functions that don't exist.
My reasoning is this:
jank is written in C++. Its compiler and runtime are both in C++. jank can compile to C++ directly (or LLVM IR). jank can reach into C++ seamlessly, which includes reaching into its own compiler/runtime. Thus, the boundary between what is C++ and what is Clojure is gone, which leaves jank as being both Clojure and C++.
Achieving this singularity is a milestone for jank and, I think, is worthy of the title.
Given how the world works, that might mean we will all sit and curse Jank instead of cursing Node. :)
These recursive initialism PL names are getting out of hand /s
I've pondered this for a while and I have no idea how jank is a recursive acronym. What're you seeing that I'm not?
It’s a joke (hence the “/s”) on the “[PL name] is [words beginning with the rest of the letters of the Pl name]” snowclone. However as time approaches infinity I’m sure it will get a recursive backronym.
Jank's A Native Klojure? :)