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The strangest thing about Flow is that its compiler is implemented in C#. So if you decide to use it in your C++ codebase, you now have a C#/.Net dependency, at least at build time.




It’s also funny because it’s a small, incomplete, incompatible subset of c++… seems like a perfect LLVM / clang rewriter case too, it would be easy to convert and be pure c++. Hell even a clang plugin to put the compile time into one process wouldn’t be awful. But i wonder looking at the rewrites if there’s not a terribly janky way to not need a compiler, if at some runtime cost of contextual control flow info.

Not even that, this should more or less be directly translateable to C++ 20 coroutines.

Also of course years older than them.

I wonder why that decision was made. I know why I, a C# developer, would make that decision, but why Apple?

The original developers (before Apple bought the company) used Visual Studio on Windows

This entire codebase was acquired by apple in a state of substantial completion and since then relatively little has changed.

Someone knew C# and was good at parsers, would be my guess. It could have just as easily been Scala or something else.



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