Self-hosting

[Immortalin]

Any plans for self hosting i.e. freestanding standard library and runtime that does not depend on OS-specific features? This would make it easier to develop drivers and kernel modules.

[mascarenhas]

We have a big dependency on the Lua runtime, so this would have to be built upon the support that currently exists for running Lua code in the kernel.

[Immortalin]

So no possibility of using this to write drivers? Can Terra run without Lua runtime?

[mascarenhas]

I have never written a driver, so have no idea of what is necessary to run in the Linux kernel, or which changes, though @gligneul might know, since his company uses Lua in the kernel. Titan generated code currently uses just a few functions from the C standard library on its own (meaning not through its reliance on Lua): memcpy, memset, and floor. In particular, Titan code only allocates memory through Lua.