8 posts
The point of porting a real program isn't to have a GPT. It's to find out where your language breaks. MicroGPT found 13 compiler issues and revealed that 31% of the code was working around language gaps.
The type checker kept rejecting programs that worked fine at runtime. Here's what it took to fix that — literal coercion, casts, bytes, indirect enums, and array-to-Vec.
Fixing generic monomorphization collisions, wiring codegen to the type checker, adding MLIR verification, and building IR visualization tools.
Walking through the Hew pipeline to fix broken tail calls, unregistered defer, SQL injection in the stdlib, duration literals stuck at the lexer, and 120 new tests.
Ripping out FlatBuffers, splitting the standard library namespace, adding a package manager, and building an export macro system.
Writing fifteen programs from scratch to find UX problems, then fixing error messages, adding else-if chains, and killing false positives.
Why Hew ended up with two compilers — the Rust/Inkwell attempt, the pivot to C++/MLIR, and rebuilding the pipeline in 12 hours.
Building Hew's lexer, parser, type checker, IR, and C codegen in under two hours. Fibonacci printed 55.