[Swift-devel] Re: Potential programming languages related projects on Swift for Ian's Grid course?

[Michael Wilde]

Hi Lars and Akiva,

Ben Clifford and Mihael Hategan are the Swift development team.
Ben works out of London, but travels here frequently.
Mihael is based here at the CI (can can often be found there).

I passed along a few of the ideas that I mentioned to you after class to 
the group email list. (Ian's on the list btw).

For a class project, the difficulty will be scaling to something that 
can be done in the available time.

I dont quite know the scale that Ian is expecting from the projects, but 
for starters, even for example if Mihael and Ben do much or all of the 
implementation work for a new language feature, a good project would be 
to test and demonstrate its use (and performance) on a distributed 
system. (Eg, the cross-product looping feature I mentioned to you).

A few ideas that might be more feasible would involve a swift 
"preprocessor" where you could prototype new language features using 
fairly simple preprocesors that emit swift code as output. For example, 
the ability to call web services might be prototyped in this manner.

A good start would be for you to try the swift tutorial(s) and 
experiment with it - make sure its something you can work with.

They are at:
http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/swift/docs/index.php

So this should hopefully kick off a discussion, and we'll see where it 
can take you.

Ben and I are headed into 3 weeks of intensive travel and teaching, but 
but hopefully you can meet face to face with Mihael to brainstorm ideas.

As we mull over things, the shape of a few good projects is sure to emerge.

- Mike





On 1/15/08 6:28 PM, Lars Bergstrom wrote:
> After your presentation on Swift, Akiva and I were very interested in any
> extension projects to Swift that you might have in mind. In particular,
> we're interested in any language extensions or language implementation
> issues you have at hand, though we're both enthused by the project in
> general and would be interested in any ideas you or  
> your team have for further fleshing out the tool that would fit inside of a
> quarter.
> 
> You mentioned that you would be out of town for a while, but would it be
> possible for you to pass this along to someone that we might be able to work
> with on this?
> 
> Thanks much,
> - Lars and Akiva
> 
>