Updates, website

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Brian Rice

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May 6, 2009, 8:32:35 PM5/6/09

to Slate project discussion

Hello all,

Mailing list discussion became sparse over the last couple of months, but activity continues. Lately I've been putting daily effort into improvements for the system along with Timmy Douglas' equal efforts, and we're motivating each other well enough.

I'll give a quick run-down of what's going on:

- IDE improvements, starting with the REPL-based debugger and the emacs mode now integrates with it to make frames and restarts "hyperlinked" to take action on them.

- Platform plugin integration into the VM, to get uname() results, run system() calls, and get/set/list environment variables.

- Revival and stabilization of the Windows port.

- Re-instating the old tests/ directory, and verification that most non-delegation-related tests work fine still.

- Re-instating the ability to run in she-bang scripts and CGI (and generate some XML).

- Re-making most of the installers, including "make install" for unices and a Windows NSIS installer.

- A portable VM timing facility to benchmark methods, and re-instating of tests/benchmark.

- A counting/tracing-style profiling facility.

- Core bootstrap files have been separated into src/core/ to relieve pressure on src/lib to contain every standard library.

- I'm starting to work on the GTK-based IDE, to develop a real usable browser (that hides grotty details by default) and debugger.

- There are many other plans, mostly half-way formed, and of course we do want to continue to innovate (LLVM dynamic JITting, Erlang-style concurrency at least for image-level messaging and I/O).

I've also ported the website over to Wordpress: http://www.slatelanguage.org and will focus on communicating about Slate issues there that don't quite fit an email forum.

I am more or less motivated right now to make Slate consumable for the public, which means addressing a lot of the rough edges and core engineering for now, and not much in the way of a release schedule yet, unless we go with a monthly clockwork release process. If you have priorities you'd like to see addressed, please discuss it.