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#jai#jonathanblow#implicitcontext

Demo: Implicit Context

Jonathan Blow

99K subscribers • 11 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid and Jai

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

27K views11 years ago1 recommendation

Programming languagesSystems programmingLanguage design and type systemsCompilers and interpretersMemory management

Jonathan Blow demonstrates the implicit context feature in the Jai programming language compiler, showing how it handles allocators without explicit parameter passing.

This is a more-formal demo of the compiler, as opposed to some of the random livestreams that happen now and again. The URL for the code to follow along is: tinyurl.com/l9sw25d Sorry about the blurriness, but hey, if you download the sources they will be very crisp!

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Engineers highlight this as an elegant solution to the context and allocator passing problem in systems programming languages.

nmiloon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Golang's big miss on memory arenas”

Implicit context 1 was one of the coolest features of a programming language I’ve ever seen that no one has ever implemented. And I’m really not sure why. Not just Go but most languages have this context passing problem with varying degrees of solution quality, making this implicit and built in could have opened up so many possibilities, more than just arenas. 1: link to this video

cyber_kinetiston Hacker News • Mentions

On “A Review of the Odin Programming Language”

I remember first seeing this idea from Jai ( link to this video ), and I'm happy it's landing in other languages. Zig went another direction and requires you to specify the allocator explicitly via a function parameter, which is understandable given the language's goal to make everything explicit.

rudedoggon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator”

> per-frame "scratch" pool allocator Here's that Jonathan Blow stream if anyone else is curious: link to this video