Merlin

Make your code fly

Merlin is a dynamically and strongly typed programming language written in Rust. Merlin's threading system empowers programmers to write powerful code that leverages concurrency - regardless of whether your system has atomics.

Merlin uses Rust's atomic data types to remove the need for a GIL without sacrificing performance. In addition, it has a register-based interpreter (like CPUs) which has large performance advantages over the Python stack-based interpreter that is simpler and needs to shuffle a lot of memory around.

Current comparison to Python:

With this code:

a=1
b=2
a+b
a+b
a+b

Total execution time:

Merlin 1.3 (release): 20 ns

./merlin program.me -t 10000

Python 3.10.6: 54.9 ns

python3 -m timeit -c "a=1;b=2;a+b;a+b;a+b"

Merlin is: 2.75x faster

With this code:

a=1
b=2
a+b
a+b
a+b
a+b
a+b
a+b

Total execution time:

Merlin 1.3 (release): 57.86 ns

./merlin program.me -t 10000

Python 3.10.6: 103 ns

python3 -m timeit -c "a=1;b=2;a+b;a+b;a+b;a+b;a+b;a+b"

Merlin is: 1.78x faster

Merlin 1.3: 2.89x slower for 2x more.

Python 3.10.6: 1.87x slower for 2x more.

Installation

To get started with Merlin:

• Download rust (preferably with rustup command line tool)
• Run make release
• Execute code using the generated binary!

Docs

• Keywords
• Memory model reasoning and internals