On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 05:28:13PM -0800, Brett C. wrote:
Neil Schemenauer wrote:
* Finish of the AST compiler.
I actually wanted to originally do that, but there is no real research involved; its just coding at this point, right?
Right. It's a prerequite to doing real research. See Jeremy's web log. If you don't want to finish the AST compiler you could just use the Python implementation. It would be slow but good enough for testing ideas.
Huh, cool. Just looked at Dylan quickly.
The reference manual is a good reading: http://www.gwydiondylan.org/drm/drm_1.htm Some of the parts I like are the builtin classes (numbers and sealing especially) and the collection protocols. The module and library system is also interesting (although overkill for many programs).
* Look at making the GC mark-and-sweep.
I don't know if it is worth it, although having so far two people suggest changing the GC to something else is interesting.
Implementating yet a another M&S GC is not research, IMHO. What _would_ be interesting is comparing the performance of reference counting and a mark and sweep collector. CPU, cache and memory speeds have changed quite dramatically. Also, comparing how easily the runtime can be integrated with the rest of the world (e.g. C libraries) would also be valuable. That said, I'm not sure it's worth it either. I find the Chicken GC more interesting and would look into that further if I had the time. Neil