Pixie - A Lightweight Lisp with 'Magical' Powers
summary
Pixie is a small Lisp that ships as a ~2.5 MB gzip, starts a REPL in ~175 ms and uses ~10 MB RAM. It pairs a tracing JIT (via RPython) with lightweight stacklets and libuv-backed async IO, produces a 743 ms dynamic Mandelbrot after warmup versus ~600 ms Java and ~500 ms LLVM, and exposes a C FFI built with Boost type‑traits that compiles tiny C helpers to get accurate signatures. The language, runtime and interop are implemented and demonstrated working across x86/ARM and major *nix OSes.
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chapters (38)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:10Performance
- 6:10PiPI
- 9:35Polymorphic Functions
- 10:50Tracing JIT
- 12:07Pi JIT
- 12:43Eli Double Promote
- 14:04Tracing
- 15:49Variable Length Function
- 16:46List Tracing
- 16:59Lightweight Threads
- 17:11Lightweight Process
- 18:07Lightweight Thread
- 19:14libuv
- 20:23sequential processes
- 21:05object system
- 22:24rocksolid C
- 22:39art python
- 23:02the holy grail
- 23:24import cosign
- 23:45different libraries
- 24:16C FFI
- 24:40C Lib clang
- 25:05Boosttype traits
- 25:25Templates
- 26:02FFI
- 26:33MathGreat
- 27:13Output
- 27:33bytecode
- 27:54import structs
- 28:47import callback
- 29:02prep callback
- 29:31Python
- 29:50Python List
- 30:27Python Append
- 31:09Mandelbrot Code
- 31:24STL Code
- 32:16Conclusion
