Monday, February 15, 2010

Some news

Just a little update on what's going on in the Liberty world.
  • Semantics: simple programs are "understood", meaning that the types are nicely created and ready to be used, in a somewhat reasonable time. Note that only the nominal case should work (yet a lot of testing is yet to be performed). The parser is expected to behave correctly when given a correct program; no provision is yet made for invalid programs (the parser's reactions range from a neat error message to a gory crash)
  • Interpreter: that's the next step after having that partially functioning semantics parser. I took that step today. When the interpreter starts to work we can build an REPL.
  • Compiler: Paolo is working on the LLVM back-end and is already having some results. I'll wait for having somewhat stabilized the semantics parser, and worked a bit on the interpreter and the REPL, before starting to think about building a full compiler. Some topics still need a lot of thought (objects representation, call stack management, garbage collection...) and the interpreter will help at least partially in putting my ideas in good order.
 Happy hacking!