PACT in GSoC 2012
Brian Charles Gernhardt
I suppose not everybody remembers me from last summer, or from #parrot over the last year, so I'm going to re-introduce myself.
My name is Brian Gernhardt and I'm an MS Student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. My current focus is programming language theory and compilers, and my thesis[1] is on compiler optimization. Next year, I will be in a PhD program (school TBD) to do additional research in this field.
Last summer, I worked on porting PAST to NQP so it could use bacek's work on directly generating bytecode[2]. The results of this were somewhat mixed[3]. At the end of that project, and sporadically since then, I've worked on designing a system I've called the Parrot Alternate Computer Toolkit (PACT)[4]. It's a rethink of our currently HLL compiler libraries, designed from the ground-up to directly output bytecode instead of relying on the aging IMCC. This is an ambitious project, but I think it could bear fruit rather quickly. The lowest levels could be used to create a PIR alternative, a disassembler, and possibly a backend for a skilled compiler writer.
I hope the community will support me using Summer of Code to start this project. In one summer, I'm fairly certain I could create a new assembly language for Parrot that has a useful set of classes that could be used in other project and future layers of PACT. Of course, I'll write up a formal proposal during the application process but wanted to start floating the idea now.
[1] http://www.cs.rit.edu/~bcg2784/
[2] https://github.com/parrot/parrot/tree/nqp_pct
[3] http://www.parrot.org/content/end-gsoc-not-time-stop...
[4] https://github.com/parrot/PACT
~~ Brian Gernhardt
benabik on #parrot, #perl6
MS Student, RIT CS
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Jonathan "Duke" Leto
In general, a big +1. Please start to think about what the formal
proposal will look like so we can give feedback.
I am a big fan of have a few small deliverables that you know you will
be able to accomplish along with a few more ambitious deliverables
that depends on how things progress.
Duke
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Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jona...@leto.net>
Leto Labs LLC
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