[Swift-devel] karajan compiler

[Mihael Hategan]

On Sun, 2008-06-08 at 19:10 -0500, Ian Foster wrote:
> Mihael:
> 
> Cool. Have you also looked at whether you could use some existing  
> functional language compiler? We have real experts right here on  
> campus--could be well worth talking to them.

Yes, I did. Unfortunately very few can use Java libraries and even fewer
have lightweight threading. And those seem to be the things that cannot
be easily added as an afterthought.

> 
> Ian.
> 
> 
> On Jun 7, 2008, at 6:21 PM, Mihael Hategan wrote:
> 
> > In the past week I've been playing a little with trying to see how
> > viable such an idea would be. It seems like it is.
> >
> > The difficulty was in keeping lightweight threading in. This seems  
> > to be
> > doable pretty efficiently with a fair amount of switch statements.
> > Though trying it on real things would probably reveal the need for  
> > some
> > adjustments.
> >
> > I also wanted to have proper lexical scoping, in the style of ML. That
> > also seems to be working fairly well.
> >
> > The third part was some type system, and it turns out type inference  
> > was
> > also easy to put in. So the end result is something that is statically
> > scoped, but type annotations are optional. In terms of Swift this  
> > would
> > translate into an easier implementation of the Swift type system,  
> > which
> > is currently quite contrived.
> >
> > Speeds seem to be in the range of about 1.5 orders of magnitude faster
> > (50x) (mostly due to the fact that context switches happen in a more
> > regular fashion).
> >
> > I'll be committing the code in a separate module in cog at some  
> > point in
> > the future, so that others can play with it (though I suspect others
> > means Ben), even if it may never see more development. It's, of  
> > course,
> > missing a lot of things.
> >
> > Mihael
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Swift-devel at ci.uchicago.edu
> > http://mail.ci.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/swift-devel
> 
>