SBCL: The Assembly Code Breadboard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39859849 - March 2024 (19 comments)
SBCL: Assembly code breadboard (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28450473 - Sept 2021 (4 comments)
SBCL: The Ultimate Assembly Code Breadboard (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959147 - June 2016 (2 comments)
SBCL: The Ultimate Assembly Code Breadboard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408807 - March 2014 (75 comments)
Using SBCL as a macro-assembler is extremely cool, and then allowing CL code to call into the VM is where it really blows my mind.
Obviously it’s been over a decade since this article was written. For someone less familiar with SBCL internals (or CL in general), would something like AsmJit or Iced be a good way to achieve similar things?
Absolutely. I think TFA is hooking into the actual code emitter used by SBCL's evaluator-compiler, since it's not actually primitive, but implemented in Lisp and loaded into the image itself.
My guess at context: from the earliest days of Lisp, I think there was an expectation that Lisp systems would expose as much of their internals as possible... including their internal JIT, which is being plugged into here. I think the name for it was the "LISP Assembly Program" (LAP).
I have started learning SBCL internal from the beginning of this year with the help of GPT, and I really want to contribute to SBCL compiler someday in future.