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Demo: Implicit Context

Jonathan Blow1 HN recommenders · 2022–2025
28K views · demo · dated · Uploaded 2015-05-21

Jonathan Blow gives a formal, hour-long demo of his Jai compiler focused on the implicit context feature. The context carries things like allocators through a program without explicit parameter passing, and the talk walks through the code.

Cited in discussions of memory arenas and allocators as the origin of the implicit context idea that later appeared in Odin and other languages.

Programming language designCompilers, interpreters & program analysis

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3 comments from Hacker News

@cyber_kinetist2022 · in “A Review of the Odin Programming Language”

I remember first seeing this idea from Jai ( [VIDEO] ), and I'm happy it's landing in other languages. Zig went another direction and requires you to specify the allocator explicitly via a function parameter, which is understandable given the language's goal to make everything explicit.

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@rudedogg2022 · in “Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator”

> per-frame "scratch" pool allocator Here's that Jonathan Blow stream if anyone else is curious: [VIDEO]

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@nmilo2025 · in “Golang's big miss on memory arenas”

Implicit context [1] was one of the coolest features of a programming language I’ve ever seen that no one has ever implemented. And I’m really not sure why. Not just Go but most languages have this context passing problem with varying degrees of solution quality, making this implicit and built in could have opened up so many possibilities, more than just arenas. [1]: [VIDEO]

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