Now You C It. Now You Don't!

Currently, much of the software that we would like to run fast on multi-core processors is written in C — a language in which expressing concurrency is difficult and error prone. Unfortunately, moving such programs to a new language is very difficult, since the programmers only know C, the tools only know C, and developers are unkeen to trust their projects to a language that might not be supported in a few years time. Our solution to this problem is Jekyll — a high level language that is losslessly inter-translatable with readable, editable C. This allows Jekyll to take advantage of C programmers and C tools, since they can use the C version of a Jekyll file, and means that if Jekyll ever ceases to be maintained, developers still have a usable C code-base.