SeExpr roadmap and future releases

[Don]

Hi,

I use Se.Expr for a few projects and was wondering what the future
plans for development are and if they'll be open sourced?

It's just there are a number of projects to extend / improve Se.Expr
I'd like to start but don't want to be duplicating work which you
might release in the near future.

Current project ideas include:

* Lowering to LLVM for JIT execution.
* Qt widget for editing expressions to make expressions more
accessible to non programmers
* Language extensions - Additional control flow constructs - loops &
functions.
* Parallel map of expressions.

You've probably implemented most if not all these features at Disney
but if they're unlikely to be released I'll start working on open
source implementations.

Thanks

- Don

[Andrew Selle]

Thanks for you message. I'll answer the current status of each of these below...

 

* Lowering to LLVM for JIT execution.

This is in the works and planned. If you look at my v2-aselle you can see my work towards this. Mostly I have been working on setting the language features so I can move to LLVM. I have a prototype LLVM implementation that  I have been meaning to integrate. Help on this would be helpful and interesting.  I can share with you and others my LLVM prototype, even though it is not quite the same language and not fully compatible.

 

* Qt widget for editing expressions to make expressions more
accessible to non programmers

This would be a great project. We have an editor internally that we cannot release verbatim, so any work in this regard would be really cool. You can look at the web page and see sort of how our editor works. I've been meaning to make a very basic one that does a few things like autocomplete and syntax highlighting to get people started, but I have not gotten around to it.

 

* Language extensions - Additional control flow constructs - loops &
functions.

We've been looking at adding some features (if you look at v2-aselle) you can see some of them. The ones we've added are:
- More vector types (between 1 vectors and 16 vectors). This opens up possibilities to quaternions, matrices, and RGBA values.  We also are adding local functions so you can do the same thing multiple times without repeating it.  We have been hesitant to add loops, because we have purposely wanted to keep this language simple in usage and also not have that many pitfalls for performance. Loops, recursion, and other control flow is usually where non-programmers get into trouble with languages.  However, if it can be done in the right way and the right reasons that's a different thing.

 

* Parallel map of expressions.

Could you explain this one a little bit more. I don't know quite what you mean. 

You've probably implemented most if not all these features at Disney
but if they're unlikely to be released I'll start working on open
source implementations.

We're definitely excited about others' working on the project!

 

Thanks

- Don