This is the first public release of Exupery, my byte code compiler,
for Squeak. It doesn't yet do much but it is a documented example of
test driven code.

The first useful goal is to compile inner loop methods. Hopefully it
should be able to provide an alternative to Slang for some inner loop
methods. The idea is to compile normal methods to machine code. This
should provide a tolerable speed up with much less effort than Slang
and hopefully get the compiler into real use early.

What would be the smallest subset of Squeak byte codes needed to be
useful for just one project? Or which methods would it be worth while
compiling first?

Exupery is available on SqueakMap and there is some documentation at
http://www.kampjes.demon.co.uk/. Feedback on both the code and the the
documentation is very much appreciated.

The compiler can compile a single method inside the image and run
it. It is currently limited by the assembler. The system can produce
tolerable code and includes a coloring register allocator. It's an
architectural skeleton that is fully end to end.

The project dream is to soften the barrier between language
implementation and normal development. It would be nice if playing
around with a dynamic compiler was no more risky than modifying the
collections classes. Also there are a large number of other projects
that could use dynamic code generation.  The idea of live code
generation is not new but hasn't been widely used. For instance,
compiling regular expressions and LR grammars to machine code could
make a Squeak implementation faster than in C if only we could do
this without needing extremely hairy programming.

Bryce