AMA: Explaining my 750 line compiler+runtime designed to GPU self-host APL
The conciseness is fascinating. One of the common criticisms of combinator style programming is the difficulty of making good error messages, or generally making small fixes in the pipeline that can&#x27;t be expressed using the abstraction (i.e. the current compositional context). A concrete example I have is in Haskell when you develop pure code and you can&#x27;t easily debug with a few print statements (more so since it&#x27;s a lazy language).<p>I think this criticism definitely applies in the real world of ever-changing programs without a very clear scope. I assume your focus is more on the academic &#x2F; &quot;poetic&quot; side of things, but nevertheless: How did such concerns influence the development of your compiler? How usable is the compiler from a dfns programmer&#x27;s perspective?<p>And since APL is a very special beast: How transferrable is your style to writing a compiler for a more conventional language (for instance, procedural), especially ones with irregularities and such?<p>(I apologize if these questions are covered in the video. Haven&#x27;t finished it yet)