On 28 December 2010 11:19, Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at vpri.org> wrote:
>  Hi,
>
>  We've been playing with John's MicroSqueak and it occured to me that
> having a bytecode compiler that is implemented outside of Squeak opens
> some possibilities, such as generate a growable image file from all
> text files, or make deep changes to the system without shooting
> yourself.
>
> I wrote a longer explanation so if you are interested, please go to:
>
> https://github.com/yoshikiohshima/SqueakBootstrapper
>
> and check it out.
>

Been there did that :)
Implementing ST compiler in C is not very hard, since syntax is
extremely simple (comparing to C).
But the thing is that now you need to keep image-side compiler and C
compiler in sync.
And very soon you will figure out, that while its extermely easy to
extend ST compiler in ST,
its very hard to do that in C (see things like Helvetia by Lukas Renggli etc).

What i like about image-side compiler that i can use the
metaprogramming and late-binding capabilities
in language for compiling the source.
While C compiler having no such flexibility, and good to have when you
plan to freeze things for ages.

That's why i prefer to implement bootstrap in smalltalk. Because it
really doesn't matters , in which language
you implementing a bootstrap..

Sorry, if my comment was discouraging. But i had to say it :)

>  Thank you!
>
> -- Yoshiki
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.