LC compilation

[Mark Smith]

Hi Skip,

I’m surprised no one has taken a stab at answering this. I'm certainly no expert on the internal workings of LC or compilers but I can take a stab at articulating what I think the answer is, and when I get it wrong someone else can jump in to correct me (I should probably know this stuff better anyway).

So if I am correct, the current environment converts LC script into some sort of (possibly binary) tree structure that is better organised to be executed by the LC engine. The engine is a big chunk of what I think is mostly Obj C (or some relative thereof) code that interprets the tree structures created in the first phase. So I guess that makes it sort of compiled? Compiled to execute in/on the LC engine, but also interpreted because the tree code is not executed on the target platform directly but is interpreted by the engine to generate the final executable result. 

As far as the script compiler project is concerned, I believe the goal is to create a byte code stream that can be interpreted more efficiently by (a possibly new?) engine. Not sure about the new engine part, but the idea is the tree structure thing goes away and in its place is a linear stream of byte codes that can both be executed more effiencetly but also optimised more fully. This particular byte stream (and here I’m going way outside my wheelhouse) is similar to what other compilers like Java, Python, (Pascal? — which I do know was a byte code compiled run time interpreted language… although companies like Borland eventually wrote Pascal compilers that executed directly on the target platform without any interpretation) produce. So, it would bring the LC compiled code more in line with what other compilers are producing which means post compilation the code could be optimised more completely using well developed industry standard approaches. And so everything ends up a little smaller and faster but it also opens the door to doing other things with the script code down the road. 

Well, that's my take on Mark Waddinghams’ most recent seminar on this topic. But he assuredly can fill you in much better than I can.

Cheers,
Mark



> On 28 May 2023, at 3:54 pm, Skip Kimpel via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> Wait… what?  I have been away from this list for a while, LC is not currently compilable??
> 
> SKIP
> 
>> On May 27, 2023, at 4:39 PM, harrison--- via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Skip,
>> 
>> Doubtful.  I would wait until after we have a compilable version of LC and then it will be more possible.
>> 
>> Rick
>> 
>>> On May 27, 2023, at 12:26 PM, Skip Kimpel via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Has anybody done anything with LC and AR?
>>> 
>>> Curious minds want to know :)
>>> 
>>> SKIP
>> 
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