"Brent Pinkney" <pinkney_b at aircom.co.za> wrote:
> Is it not possible to implement basic compiler support as a primitive ? 
> 
> You could then drop all the AST nodes from your image ? 
> Any comments on what _would_ be involved in making the compiler a (pluggable) primitive ?
> 

That doesn't sound like a good primitive -- it's not speed critical,
it's complicated, and people do tinker with it now and again.  We have
enough primitives already, if you are willing to compile code in a
separate image (possibly a previous version of the stripped image).  You
just need the ability to create a CompiledMethod, and the ability to
read in the bytecodes from disk.

Plenty of systems are implemented this way, with bootstraping as a major
consideration.  But, IMHO Squeak is better and we should keep it that way.

Lex