I'm glad this story got posted and sxc is getting some press, but the real question I asked was:

It is unknown exactly what power might come about from this combination of low level processing with high level code generation. Can you think of any possible uses?

The idea of using pre-processors to generate C code is not new to programming; but the usage of the full power of Common Lisp in such a natural way is up to the question.

Thank you for your anecdote, I appreciate the comparison with on of my favourite supercomputer companies! sxc is not necessarily a 'Lisp to C' converter, but a C -> C converter with the optional metaprogramming facilities to generate code using Common Lisp. The syntax of the sxc language is Lisp like; the semantics are C. So really this is a C -> C translator with added meta facilities.

The code that goes in and the code that comes out is strictly C. What you can do with the added ability of Common Lisp is really what's at question for me.

Unfortunately the editors made a slight mistake with the description of this tool. It's not to 're-write your lisp code in C', it's to write new C code using Lisp as the macro system.

HipHop was interesting in that it would compile PHP and make it run faster, but it's not similar to this in any way.

sxc is a dialect of Lisp that has the semantics of C. There's not cross compilation from anything to anything; the syntax of sxc is that of C, but you're editing a representation of the parse tree. This is a list, and the meta-programming facilities allow you to generate code using Common Lisp, the most powerful language for generating that type of data structure; the list.

The homoiconicity that this provides to C gives me suspect to say that it is a more powerful language overall than cc + cpp.

It's not a senior project; I graduated 20 years ago[1]. It's a tool I've created recently from some ideas I've seen and had in hopes of realizing something that is more than the sum of it's parts.

[1] Here's my senior project: http://github.com/burtonsamogr... ;-)

Yeah, but being able to do a switch on strings is pretty cool, is it not?

It's getting so bad I've switched to Solaris for my main machine, and 11.1 at that which is over 10 years old. Still the same UNIX software, an antique browser that hobbles along (but Gail works in HTML mode) but...it's solid and fast and works and has all the Solaris niceness of dtrace, ZFS and whatever else is hidden in there under the hood that hasn't changed in years and from a developer that strives to keep the platform stable for developers.

Linux has completely jumped the shark for my day to day usage. Screen blanking and never coming back, processes randomly hanging and crashing the system to not booting at all. It's been an exercise in complete frustration lately, unlike the 20 years of regular frustration knowing that what i was using *was* better than the alternatives.

So, yeah, screw it. I'm going corporate.

The next logical step in computer architecture with the speed of processors reaching a limit and the number of cores not exploding like they should be in desktop processors (although they are in GPUS) is memory. What if memory (RAM) was doubling every year and a half in computers and what that would do to architecture and software design; being a computer engineer I can see plenty of challenges that would come from that type of stretching of computer capabilities. Currently the 16GB standard is too tight and RAM is cheap. Let's start building these machines out and see what we can do with all the extra room.