Dynamic Language Runtime

[Mark Wieder]

David-

Wednesday, May 9, 2007, 8:21:09 AM, you wrote:

> A question about "writing a transcript compiler for DLR"? What does this
> involve - starting from scratch in C# or if you were RunRev and already
> presumably had some code basis for a compiler would you be able to use that
> directly - I guess not. Secondly if it means starting from scratch would
> that mean anyone could legally undertake such a thing - that is to write a
> minimal Transcript compiler for the DLR. Its not something I am picturing
> doing - but I am curious :)

Well, on one level I think that anyone could start this from scratch.
There aren't any legal restrictions that I'm aware of to anyone
creating a new xtalk compiler or interpreter or whatever.

And if you have something that compiles xtalk down to an intermediate
byte-level interpreter the way I'm given to understand the runrev
engine now works, then the first task would be to create a code
generation engine whose end result would be binary-compatible with the
jvm. This is the equivalent of creating a new platform for runrev to
run on in addition to the currently-supported platforms, rather like
taking on the project of having runrev deploy on a Treo or a Newton or
a <your platform of choice here>.

The next task would be to craft a jit compiler to handle the dynamic
binding aspect of the dlr. This is by far the harder of the two tasks
(not that I want to minimize the difficulty of the first task). It's
nothing I'd take on lightly - there are brighter minds than mine hard
at work on these things. Jruby is the most promising right now, and
the entire Rails framework seems to be working fine, thanks to a *lot*
of hard work and the cooperation of the ruby community.

<Starting to veer off-topic for this list, so I don't want to get in
too deep. But if you're seriously interested in working on the dlr,
John Rose is the person to be in touch with. And he's actively casting
his net for more collaborators.>

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net