NEWBIE Questions about bytecode emitting and JIT Compiling and an OO library

[James Michael Dupont]

Dear fellow hackers,

First of all, I would like to say that I hope that you dont take
offence at my silly questions and crazy ideas! ;)

I have been looking in the amazing work that you have been doing with
parrot and the work that Michal Wallace has been doing with the Pirate,
the following questions have came to mind :

1. Is it possible to stored in some way ASTs inside of parrot IMC byte
code in such a way that they may be evaluated and compiled at runtime?
We talked about this in the context of metadata and bazookas months
ago, and I am ready to start making a simple prototype on top of pirate
for storeing the ASTS in the metadata alongside of the bytecode.

2. Is it possible to emit new IMC routines on the fly and have them be
loaded in as if they came from the load routine? like a form or
reflection.emit?

3. It is possible to make the entire parrot object system as a lib that
implements objects as special variables? like the old ATT CFront?

4. Is there any attempts at debugging support in parrot, for a way to
mix the original source code and assembly together, a way to enable
tracebility of.

These features would allow portions of the features not supported to be
added into a lib and for the lib to JIT implement these funky features
or fail gracefully.

Any ideas or am I way over board?

mike

PS: please feel free to ban me from this list for wasting your time and
bytes with off topic posts and crazy ideas, you may have the sudden
urge to ban me for no reason at all whatsoever. :)

=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

[Leopold Toetsch]

James Michael Dupont <mdupo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear fellow hackers,

> First of all, I would like to say that I hope that you dont take
> offence at my silly questions and crazy ideas! ;)

There are no silly questions, only silly answers and crazy ideas are the
motor of development - trying to answer some:

> 1. Is it possible to stored in some way ASTs inside of parrot IMC byte
> code in such a way that they may be evaluated and compiled at runtime?

Not yet. But parrot should finally be able to run from some kind of AST
directly.

> 2. Is it possible to emit new IMC routines on the fly and have them be
> loaded in as if they came from the load routine? like a form or
> reflection.emit?

Yes. Have a look at t/syn/eval.t and languages/parrot_compiler/parrot.pasm.

> 4. Is there any attempts at debugging support in parrot, for a way to
> mix the original source code and assembly together, a way to enable
> tracebility of.

HLL source is currently being discussed. PASM source + i386 assembly[1] can
be stepped through: s. docs/jit.pod and docs/debug.pod.
[1] may be other processors too.

> mike

leo