MC in basic

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Mon Dec 13 22:49:16 UTC 2004


> Pardon my ignorance.  Is the "new" compiler a better Smalltalk to 
> bytecode compiler, or a bytecode to binary compiler?  It is not clear 
> from earlier posts I have access to.

The new compiler is just a better text to byte-code compiler. Sorry no 
JIT :(.

The new compiler is slower than the old one:) BUT make the possibility 
of building new things (MOP, byte code to byte code translation,  AST 
transformation) much much much easier.  It is also really cool to read 
and understand. :) It uses the
RB AST, is based on SmaCC so you can get a good Smalltalk syntax.

For example, we can expect to have a really cool late binding method 
compilation (which would allow us to have state extension adding 
instance variable to a class and not having to recompile everything 
just right now, which is a really cool
feature that etoy project manager would dream to have (ok they hard 
time but build a system that pays attention to that))
but with the new compiler implementing such a kind of schema is easy.

Another example is that this compiler will ease the creation of real 
mop for Smalltalk may be new AOP frameworks, all kinds of analysis tool 
or trick based on byte-code rewriting. So it will enable creation of 
new assets that are right now not
really possible to dream about.

After for people that really want to change the language (not me) we 
can imagine that it is trivial to introduce
annotation as in tweak for example without having to DUPLICATE and 
PATCH the compiler :))))))
Yes we can do it in another way. :)

So you see we want to enable creativity with this new compiler (thanks 
to anthony)

Stef




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