Am 01.09.2005 um 08:32 schrieb Brent Pinkney:

Hi,

Does anyone else think the Full Closure Compiler is a priority for 3.9 ?


For me, yes. I'm slowly working on it, looks quite promising. The plan is to
have the new compiler optionally available quite soon. 

Then this needs a quite hard testing phase, as it's a real critical part of the infrastructure.

This compiler can create both old-style blocks and closures, and it's easy to turn
it off completely and just use the old one. 

I'm now working on getting all the infrastructure into 3.9 (merge the overrrides, add the code
needed for the closures-runtime code...). When that's done, the newcompiler will
be a module: drop-in, easy to load and unload, no patch needed.

It should be made clear that the closure runtime would only be used when compiling
code with the new compiler in closure-mode, so this change will have no impact at
all for performance or stability.

Traits and what-not are nice but a solidly engineered Comnpiler is IMHO more important.

The new compiler is quite nice... nothing is perfect, of course, but it's a promising starting point.
One thing that it does quite well is to enable experiments: The backend is reusable for other
compilers and makes it very easy to muck around with bytecode (see ByteSurgeon), the RBAST
is a good startingpoint for making lots of stuff easier and cleaner, and the SmaCC based Parser 
is easy to change (if you get to now how to use SmaCC), and so on.

     Marcus