README.md

velociracket

A Racket Racket-like language to write high performance programs.

Idea

The idea of velociracket is to explore how much of Racket you can implement, and how many constraints you need to impose to allow generate really fast code.

velociracket is going to be implemented as a racket language that, at least, initially compiled to C but interoperates seemlessly with other racket languages. I would hope for it to look exactly like racket but if, for the sake of performance, some constraints are required then they shall be inserted.

The user writes something like

#lang velociracket

(define (foo x)
  (printf "Hello from velociracket~n")
  (+ x 1))
  
(foo 2)

Something like this would happen:

Hello from velociracket
3

The string comes from the standard output and the 3 is the result value of calling (foo 2).

In the background all code converted to C, compiled into a dynamic library, and FFI bindings are automatically generated and exported if any of the values are provided.

Reader and Expander

Since we use S-expressions already we don't need to implement a new reader. Instead we use the normal syntax reader (read-syntax) and then we implement the expander.

The expander needs to

1. Convert the syntax to C;
2. Compile the C into a dll;
3. Generate C FFI syntax to interoperate with Racket