The Lone Lisp Heap (matheusmoreira.com)

You can learn a lot developing a language and runtime but you will reach a point when you'll realize you can go back and do it all better.

Flashbacks to when I implemented a new storage system for a Lisp/Prolog system while porting the core code from Pascal to C. We stuck with linked list of pages so we could keep pointers and gain some speed over array indexing for every object access.

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I don’t know too much about this, but strictly based on the name I assumed that you should use a heap. Is that not right?

FTA: “Lone is a lisp interpreter written in freestanding C. There is no dynamic memory allocation in freestanding C. There is no such thing as malloc. There is no libc. There is only me and the code. If I wanted malloc, I would have to write it myself.

[…]

mmap is awesome but Linux's got something even more awesome: mremap, which makes it almost trivial to manage the page-based heap.“*

⇒ they are using “freestanding” in a non-standard way. Usually, it means running on bare metal without an OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standalone_program: “A standalone program, also known as a freestanding program, is a computer program that does not load any external module, library function or program and that is designed to boot with the bootstrap procedure of the target processor – it runs on bare metal”

Such a delight to read a technical article, and about something outside the hype cycle.

I also liked the color scheme.

As a Brazilian, i'll let my nationalism escape a little bit to say that it is awesome to see such an incredible work done by a fellow brasileiro. This gives me the same feeling of awesomeness that I get when I see José Valim's work on Elixir.

I only wish I could be as diligent and focused to do a thing like this, because I think it would be so much fun. I bought the Crafting Interpreters book a while ago, but still haven't got time to actually go through with it.

Well, maybe one day...