Dynamic Language Runtime

[Mark Wieder]

David-

I was part of a DLR roundtable discussion at CommunityOne day at
JavaOne yesterday, so I think I can speak to this from the bleeding
edge. A few points to consider:

1. The DLR is alpha. I'm bullish on it, and it's very promising, but
there are quite a few rough edges and things that just aren't worked
out yet. There's no consensus on threads, for instance. Give it time.

2. The DLR means a lot more than just being able to run something in a
browser. It promises cross-language compatibility, the ability to run
modules written in one language within the context of another
language.

3. There's never been a jit compiler for xtalk. Not that it couldn't
be done, but that brings headaches of its own. The whole "short path /
long path" thing, for one, is something that I don't think has ever
been considered for xtalk syntax.

4. Peter Fisk's Smalltalk compiler is "capable of processing
arithmetic expressions". That's still a far cry from a full-blown
Smalltalk compiler. I'm reasonably certain that a compiler that would
process "put 2 + 3" in Transcript wouldn't be that hard to build. But
there's a lot more to the infrastructure than that.

5. We can't all be Peter Fisk.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net