Hacker News: liamilan

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built"

liamilan — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 05:25:16 +0000

Brothers think alike ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17871313

Show HN: Implementing and Training a Transformer and Tokenizer in Rust

liamilan — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 20:37:26 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/liam-ilan/gpt-rs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44779552

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Terminal3d – View 3D Models in Your Terminal, Built with Rust

liamilan — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 20:30:01 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/liam-ilan/terminal3d

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42166940

Points: 17

# Comments: 1

New comment by liamilan in "What you learn by making a new programming language"

liamilan — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 21:22:40 +0000

I built Crumb (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb) a year ago, before starting university. It completely changed the way I conceptualized programming as a whole. You start feeling deja-vu every time you open a new language, and the "ah-ha!" feeling you get when you see something in another language you had to think about when implementing your own is super rewarding.

A year later (this summer) I used Crumb to land my first job at a pretty cool startup! The payoff was way more than I could have ever expected.

New comment by liamilan in "Crafting Interpreters"

liamilan — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 19:00:32 +0000

It was my first time making a language, so I built into the language whatever was needed to build something cool with Crumb.

Wanted first class functions to simplify the parse step (they can be treated like any other value), but I needed a different mechanism to invoke “native code” vs user-defined methods, so there’s two different types for that.

Needed some kind of compound data type, but I didn’t want to deal with side effects from pass by reference, so Crumb implements lists, but they are always pass by value :)

P.s. theres some pretty neat stuff build with Crumb at https://github.com/topics/crumb if anyone’s interested!

New comment by liamilan in "Crafting Interpreters"

liamilan — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 03:35:37 +0000

Read Crafting Interpreters when building Crumb (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb). It was indispensable, especially the sections on scope and local variables. The balance between technical implementation and conceptual insights is super helpful, especially when trying to go off of the book’s set path.

It’s inspiring to see technical writing done like this. As an aspiring engineer, this sets a really high standard to aim for - excellent resource.

New comment by liamilan in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2024)"

liamilan — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 23:45:15 +0000

  Location: Vancouver, BC
  Remote: Yes, can work onsite/hybrid as well
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: JavaScript, Node.js, Express, Python, Poetry, Flask, Git, Java, C, C++
  Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rxE6SmDzM02jQikSbBFKIH1-ptAQ8rV6/view?usp=sharing
  Email: liamilanyvr@gmail.com

Hi! I'm Liam, a freshman at UBC, aiming to specialize in Computer Science/Physics. Looking for a software related internship in the summer. I've been programming for 7 years, and built dozens of projects, most of them can be found on my Github (https://github.com/liam-ilan).

Over the summer, I built Crumb (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb), a programming language from scratch, which was front paged here a couple months ago! I'm also a member of the firmware team at UBC Formula Electric, working on porting firmware for the Front Sensor Module to our next car.

Open to doing just around anything you need me to do. If you have an opening, or any advice, hit me up :D

New comment by liamilan in "The Flix Programming Language"

liamilan — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 06:58:39 +0000

Just a friendly UBC piggyback on Waterloo’s programming language ;)

Over summer, I built my own little functional language, Crumb (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb). Unlike Flix, the scope is tiny, but some pretty awesome stuff has been done with it. (Checkout this pixel art editor in your terminal, 100% Crumb: https://github.com/ronilan/crumbicon).

There’s a template (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb-template) and vscode highlighter (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb-vscode) for anyone who wants to mess around with it. Any feedback super appreciated :D

Show HN: The Periodic Table of Electron Orbitals

liamilan — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 22:21:00 +0000

Article URL: https://liam-ilan.github.io/electron-orbitals/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38338991

Points: 11

# Comments: 3

Show HN: Tiny Syntax Highlighter

liamilan — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:18:59 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb-vscode

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38271721

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Show HN: A Simple Show HN TUI Client in 93 Lines of Crumb

liamilan — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 19:56:21 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb-show-hn

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743603

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Show HN: 34 X 34 Crumb Script Renders a Spinning Cube

liamilan — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 20:29:39 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb-cube

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37538410

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Minor Issue

liamilan — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 18:30:14 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb/issues/8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364157

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

liamilan — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 23:31:20 +0000

Robert Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters (https://craftinginterpreters.com/) is an awesome resource :D

Though I didn't implement his language exactly, a lot of what he talks about carries over anywhere. It especially helped me figure out how to handle the memory management and scoping.

Vincent Jacques' DrawGrammar (https://jacquev6.github.io/DrawGrammar/) was also super helpful. Getting to see the syntax definition visually made writing it so much easier :).

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

liamilan — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 22:36:02 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

liamilan — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 22:35:38 +0000

Yeah actually, stay tuned! :D

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

liamilan — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 04:04:40 +0000

Crumb is garbage collected (there is no need to manually allocated/deallocate memory)... though there is no background "garbage collector" process running... The interpreter for Crumb is a tree-walk interpreter, and it just frees memory whenever it can... Crumb frees memory in the following cases:

1) When a function is finished, all memory related to the scope of that runtime is freed.

2) When an value is not returned out of a statement, or assigned to a variable, said value is freed.

3) When a function is applied, if an argument has no reference (it is not stored in a variable), it is freed.

4) Additionally, if the function itself has no reference (such as in the case of an immediately invoked function), it is freed.

Hope that clarifies things a bit :D

Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter

liamilan — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 17:28:10 +0000

Hi all!

I'm going into my freshman year, and figured that the best way to prepare for the intro to programming Racket course would be to implement my own garbage-collected, dynamically typed, functional programming language in C ;)

Anyways... here's the repo: https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb

I started learning C over the summer, so I still have a whole lot to learn... Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! :D

Hacker News: liamilan

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built"

Show HN: Implementing and Training a Transformer and Tokenizer in Rust

Show HN: Terminal3d – View 3D Models in Your Terminal, Built with Rust

New comment by liamilan in "What you learn by making a new programming language"

New comment by liamilan in "Crafting Interpreters"

New comment by liamilan in "Crafting Interpreters"

New comment by liamilan in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2024)"

New comment by liamilan in "The Flix Programming Language"

Show HN: The Periodic Table of Electron Orbitals

Show HN: Tiny Syntax Highlighter

Show HN: A Simple Show HN TUI Client in 93 Lines of Crumb

Show HN: 34 X 34 Crumb Script Renders a Spinning Cube

Minor Issue

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

New comment by liamilan in "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter

Show HN: Visualizing the Impossible – How to Simulate Electrons

Show HN: My first C project – An interpreter built with WASM and Emscripten