harlan

It will be interesting to see what the final winner of GPU programming looks like. There's also the possibility of FPGAs making their way into consumer hardware, and right now the pure-Python library MyHDL is a great choice for those. There are a few attempts at abstracting over OpenCL like https://github.com/eholk/harlan, and some intriguing domain specific attempts like http://halide-lang.org/ but I think it will be a while yet before something takes over. I also don't think whatever it is can succeed without corporate backing.

> are even more niche Exactly. Compilers construction is a very specific problem domain, which requires specially tailored DSLs, not a "general purpose" language. Haskell is a way too general purpose for this task. > and no major programming language has been written in them. C is even more unsuitable for this than Haskell, and yet most of the compilers are written in C. Technical superiority does not count at all in choosing an implementation platform. > Because no known programming language resorts to "a few lines of Prolog" to save a few tens of lines for "region inference"? JFYI, a prototype implementation of SSA for GCC was written in Prolog (see the Sebastian Pop works [1]). If embedding Prolog in C was technically feasible, it would have stayed this way. Also, to see how much Prolog rocks, check out Harlan [2] In order to avoid u

Currently Prolog-derived languages are making a sort of a comeback - Kanren is widely used, just look at the number of ports and variations. My favourite recent example of cKanren used inside a compiler is Harlan [1] (see the region inference pass). P.S. I'm really getting tired of the ever growing proportion of video vs. text in the otherwise valuable content. I'm genuinely interested in the topic but there is no way I can watch it. Dreaming of a service which would transcribe arbitrary videos for a tiny fee. [1] https://github.com/eholk/harlan

Not even a full Prolog, but Datalog, is very well suited for querying about graphs. I.e., for quite a lot of things you want to do inside a compiler. See an example here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mcarbin/papers/aplas05.pdf I also use full Prolog to implement type systems. Prolog extended with a constraint solver is another thing one may want to employ for an elaborate program analysis, see how https://github.com/eholk/harlan is using cKanren for its region inference. So, in my book, Prolog per se may have very limited use outside of teaching, but an embedded Prolog or a dumbed down Datalog can be an extremely powerful querying DSL which can make LINQ look dumb and clumsy.