Stack machines are arguably the simplest kind of computer architecture. Their LIFO structure is quite suitable for block-oriented languages. The code size for a stack machine can be very compact because most instructions have no operand field.
"Concatenative programming and stack-based languages" by Douglas Creager
The Topos of Programming | Yon
A topos-oriented programming language. Native via MLIR and LLVM, with a content-addressed heap on the Leech lattice.
Please
Please is a cross-language build system with an emphasis on high performance, portability, extensibility and correctness.
Why Futhark?
A high-performance and high-level purely functional data-parallel array programming language that can execute on the GPU and CPU.
P-code machine
In computer programming, a P-code machine (portable code machine[1]) is a virtual machine designed to execute P-code, the assembly language or machine code of a hypothetical central processing unit (CPU). The term P-code machine is applied generically to all such machines (such as the Java virtual machine (JVM) and MATLAB pre-compiled code), as well as specific implementations using those machines. One of the most notable uses of P-Code machines is the P-Machine of the Pascal-P system. The developers of the UCSD Pascal implementation within this system construed the P in P-code to mean pseudo more often than portable; they adopted a unique label for pseudo-code meaning instructions for a pseudo-machine.
p-code
Niklaus Wirth specified a simple p-code machine in the 1976 book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. The machine had 3 registers - a program counter p, a base register b, and a top-of-stack register t. There were 8 instructions:
Engineering High-Performance Parsers with Data-Oriented Design
Notes from building Yuku: the AST is flat arrays of u32 indices instead of a pointer tree, and memory layout, allocation, strings, unicode, and serialization all follow from that one decision.
The Story of C++: The World's Most Consequential Programming Language | The Official Story
Forth
Forth is a stack-based programming language created in the 1970s by Chuck Moore.
Modular: The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software
Compilers occupy a special place in computer science. They're a canonical course in computer science education. Building one is a rite of passage. It forces you to confront how software actually works, by examining languages, abstractions, hardware, and the boundary between human intent and machine execution.
Pony
An open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language.
Practical Foundations for Programming Languages
Andrew Kelley: A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD)
DSPy on Twitter / X
DSPy is the highest-bandwidth language to talk to computers in a just-precise-enough way.First 36 lines below:1. Take arbitrarily long content: `chunks`.2. Build a global Table of Contents.3. Distribute chunks into sections to be written.4. Recursively write each section. pic.twitter.com/7NN61isFLs— DSPy (@DSPyOSS) May 13, 2025
The mythical matched modules | Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
Certified compilers are complex software systems. Like other large systems, they demand modular, extensible designs. While there has been progress in extensible metatheory mechanization, scaling extensibility and reuse to meet the demands of full ...
