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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