You could just use a C compiler to write the assembly code from this, and it'd be far less buggy.

Before there were LLMs, there were about 65 years of other program-writing-programs to save labor.

> I wonder if an LLM would be up to the job of writing the assembly code from this?

I could see a compiler doing that.

If it's speed you're after, much more analysis (and thus code) is needed. See V8.

A C compiler can output fairly readable code if you turn off optimizations, and it's definitely not going to take thousands of lines to do this in modern assembly. It may be only just barely a thousand lines to do this in aarch64, and the LLM can probably do it.

From what I've seen the LLM do it can definitely enhance these programs if you know what to ask, and it can explain how any piece this code works. It may even be able to add garbage collection to the evaluator since the root registers are explicit, and the evaluator only acts on static memory.

This is the path that the GNU Mes and Guix folks are taking: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

(sans LLMs -- I believe they have a Scheme (GNU Mes) that can be compiled from their 357 byte bootloader, and that Scheme can run a C compiler that can compile tinycc, and I think there's a path from tinycc to compiling gcc. I'm not sure how far it can get after that -- this blog post[1] implies that you still need a binary of guile to run Gash, which is a POSIX shell written in Scheme. I'm guessing the plan is to either simplify Gash or complexify Mes to be able to remove Guile as a dependency.

[1] https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

Thanks! Do you mean MIT Scheme's C backend? I've used MIT Scheme on and off for a long time and have never touched the C backend & have no idea how it works, so this is interesting.

(MIT Scheme also has a native code compiler for Intel CPUs, which seems to be what most users of MIT Scheme (an admittedly small community) actually use.)

I think a very rudimentary implementation (which is easy to understand) is in the SICP book

You'll still probably need the `strcmp` because the pointers won't be the same unless you check for them and make them the same.

You may be thinking about how `eq?` (reference equality) works in scheme. That's usually done by hashing the identifier string. Which is the more general solution to this equality problem.