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perl11
potion
C2010–2019
perl11 / potion

potion

_why the lucky stiff's little language (the official repo... until _why returns)

Languages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
11Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
679GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

_why the lucky stiff's little language (the official repo... until _why returns)

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year17 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2010-07-23 08:53:40 UTC to 2019-10-07 01:37:32 UTC.

02462010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20102011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 4 submissions, 2 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2019

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20102010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC642
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC220
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

17 sources
peteretep·Oct 7, 2019
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/potion-lang/TRDuHMxz... rurban writes: I plan to use potion, the VM and compiler for a perl fork, codename p2. perl5 and perl6, in spirit of parrot, just 40x faster, and better than the ongoing perl on JVM plans. See https://github.com/perl11/potion/blob/p2/README.p2 So naturally I'm going to enhance potion also. New are libpotion.so, improved make times, seperated config and dist/install targets via config.inc, dist.mak. I didn't like that every make probed and shelled too much. Now it only does when needed. I fixed load readline (the wrong path), and changed the LOADER_PATH to (lib, PREFIX/lib/potion, .) . at first is a security risc. added support native extensions: darwin .dylib vs .bundle. With load .pnb is favored over .pn. I also added libdisasm support for nicer jit debugging, and improved t
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he parser interface for multiple language support. I'll add in the next months dlcall (FFI), exception handling, arbitrary precision math and a lot of libraries to support perl5 and nqp, the perl6 bootstrapper. I'll probably come up with a fast intermediate language to write those libraries, and I'm not sure if it will be potion (the language) or a small fast subset of perl.
In Potion Lang
rurban·May 10, 2015
> Also, register VMs typically have three operands. Wrong. Only SSA VMs (with an optimizing compiler) need three operands. Simple register VMs as well as hardware CPUs have two operands only, and you can easily fit them into one word then. You cannot do better SSA based optimizations then, but the VM speed is much faster than with two or multi word ops, which blow up your instruction cache. lua has to use shorter ranges to get 3 operands into one word. Writing a JIT with two-address ops is also trivial. It's a straightforward conversion using fixed registers. Sample: https://github.com/perl11/potion > Specialising each instruction for each possible register for three operands would result in a ridiculous volume of code. Nobody does that, it's not needed. > Special purpose instructions that access fixed registers would be fine, but gener
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al purpose operand references cannot be sanely implemented in this way. Existing register VMs use memory because it's faster. No. You need general purpose operand insns for only one or two fixed registers (eax, edx typically). Nobody implements all possible combinations. And you use the stack to shuffle values around, not memory.
In Implementing a Virtual Machine in C

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