[ANN] Closure Compiler

Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de
Tue Mar 25 10:12:17 UTC 2003


On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 03:32:42AM -0500, Anthony Hannan wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> A new version of my closure compiler is ready at
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/ClosureCompiler (also linked from
> SqueakMap).  The runtime has not changed (closures, context
> enhancements, continuations, three new primitives, etc.), but the
> compiler itself has been refactored (once again).  This time it uses the
> SmaCC parser generator and the Refactory abstract syntax tree.  Also, the
> back-end has been refactored a bit and the decompiler has been totally
> rewritten.  A special thanks goes to John Brant and Don Roberts for
> creating both Smacc and the Refactory Browser, and to Markus Gaelli
> and Daniel Vainsencher for porting them, respectively, to Squeak.
> Below is a short description of the closure compiler copied from the
> Compiler class comment.
> 

Wow, that's nice!

We really need to start thinking about how to move this stuff into
the main release...

Question: There has in the past been the impression that we would
do all "incompatible" changes in the (mythical) Version 4.

Does it really make sense to pile up all these changes (e.g. Tim's simpler
compiled methods) and then postpone adoption indefinitly (because the
change is so big)?

The rational for not doing these changes incrementally was allways
compatibility: You should be able to run old images on new vms and
new images with old vms. 
Is this really important? We ship new VMs with each release anyway,
and the old vm's are available via ftp forever, so doing incompatible 
changes shouldn't actually be so problematic in practice.

I'd really like to see Tim's CompiledMethod changes and the ClosureCompiler 
added to the main release soon.

And, because I really think the SmaCC-and-Refactory bases compiler
is really important, maybe it would even make sence to "backport" 
this to the current non-closure block implementation and inlcude this 
even as soon as 3.6.

    Marcus

-- 
Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de  -- Squeak! http://squeak.de



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