A faster Python?, Python compiler, Dylan,...

[Ian Bicking]

On Tue, 2002-04-09 at 00:57, Ian Bicking wrote:
> One of the big advantages they had of this system was that they could
> run the VM inside Squeak and use Squeak's excellent debugging tools
> (well, I think they were actually running it in another version of
> Smalltalk when they were bootstrapping).  The language was a subset of
> Smalltalk, which made this possible.  Pyrex isn't a subset, since it
> introduces new keywords and static types -- the static types could
> potentially be ignored, with the expectation that you might encounter
> new type-related bugs when you moved to C.  This would have been an
> issue for Squeak as well -- it's certainly no closer to C than Python --
> but I don't know how they solved this problem.

I looked at this a bit, and I think I realize how they did it: Slang
(Squeak's C-like subset) is really, really boring.  It can't interact
with Squeak -- it's used to implement the VM and potentially plugins to
the VM, but the layers remain very separate.  It doesn't seem to have
type definitions, so I don't know what's going on with that... maybe
it's making everything an int... they speak of it as a portable
assembler, and maybe they mean that more than you'd think.

This is all from spending 15 minutes looking at the VM code in Squeak,
so I could be entirely wrong.  There doesn't seem to be any
documentation for Slang.

  Ian