Thursday, April 26, 2007

Introduction to the NewCompiler project

Here is a short description for the NewCompiler for Squeak project.

This project aims to:

- provide a better framework interface
- bring full closures to an usable state
- provide many ways to manipulate your code (e.g. ByteSurgeon, ChangeBoxes, Reflectivity, Gutenberg..)

Last year for the Summertalk I implemented the following features:

- complete support for method pragmas
- enhanced error messages for the new parser
- support for parsing and modeling comments

I have discussed with Marcus, we started the project by doing some benchmark to see how slow the NewCompiler is compared to the current one. The conclusion was that we need new bytecodes and new primitives to make the closures as fast as blocks were before.

We will also document the closures and how the user can interact with the NewCompiler.

If have questions feel free to join the NewCompiler mailing list.

2 comments:

Damien Cassou said...

Sounds interesting. Do you plan to use this compiler as the default squeak one sooner or later?

mathk said...

Yes :) Actually It's the aim of this GSoC