Starting Work on New Project: LKit – Simple Lisp-Like Language
Today I've spent a good bit of time working on a new project - a lisp-like language in C++ for processing scripts in as efficient manner as possible. The idea was really from some work I've done in the past as well as talking to some nice guys at a start-up that are looking to do the same kind of thing. What I was thinking was that I'd put something together, and point them to it so they could get an idea of how I'd do it. Then, they are free to use it or not, and I've done my part to help them out.
I interviewed with them, but I don't think I'm going to be getting an offer, or taking the offer, as it's likely to be lower than what I have from another place, and it's a small shop, and therefore, a significantly greater risk. But I want to help them, and this is what they were hoping I'd be doing if I joined the group.
The first steps were pulling up the ideas I had from the original code, but there were a lot of things about that code that I didn't like - specifically in the area of performance. I'd like this version to be as fast as possible as it's going to be working on very large data sets - typically time series data, and so the type of data is somewhat restricted, but the amount is enormous.
I got the first two classes built: value and then variable (a value with a name). Now I need to step back a bit and work on the rest of the component design: expressions, functions, etc. The question will be: Should I break out the evaluation methods from value into a different base class? I'm not sure if I need to do this, or if it's really going to benefit the design in any way.
Certainly, it'd be nice to have all the "evaluate-able" objects based off one super class, but I'm not sure that I need that level of flexibility. After all, a function takes a series of values as arguments, and produces a value. An expression is really a function and/or values in some relation to one another. It's not like I need to have this all that different from what it is now.
For instance, I can base the function on the value and have the result value put into the ivar for the value as a cached value to speed up the resulting calculations. That would be nice. Then expressions are something else… maybe they are just relations of values. Not sure.
In any case, I've got a start, and it's going to take a lot more work to get something ready to put on GitHub and show to the guys at the start-up. But I'll get there.