>> Sorry, if my comment was discouraging. But i had to say it :)
>  Not at all.  I should also stress that our main project is make a
>new system, and this is just a side project for my learning cuve to
>understand things in terms of Squeak.  I probably am not going to so
>much time on this variant, but would like to do similar thing for a
>new system...

What is a "new" system ?
What change make a system, another system?

If the system is a closed system, any change (a bit) make
 it another system, without compromise with prior
 system (it is another set of rules).
In a system that can change (like smalltalk) identity of the system
 is preserved; no matter where the change is made.
What make it the same system is the preservation of identity.

The change that make a system another system,
 is the (intentional) change of it's name.

happy "new" year!
Ale.






----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yoshiki Ohshima" <yoshiki at vpri.org>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" 
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 1:48 PM
Subject: Re: [squeak-dev] A Bootstrap Compiler


At Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:32:52 +0100,
Igor Stasenko wrote:
>
> 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 :)

  Ah, now I remember you mentioned it before.

> 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).

  Well, my bootstrap compiler and image compiler are both in variants
of PEG parser generators.  And, presumably both should be the same
source but only use different backend, as Nikolay suggested.  So, C is
just a convenience target I could use, but not really essential.

> 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 :)

  Not at all.  I should also stress that our main project is make a
new system, and this is just a side project for my learning cuve to
understand things in terms of Squeak.  I probably am not going to so
much time on this variant, but would like to do similar thing for a
new system...

  Thanks!

-- Yoshiki