[Swift-devel] intermediate XML

[Tim Armstrong]

Makes sense to me if it simplifies the code - I'm not sure how much ongoing
maintenance overhead it is to keep up the additional transformations.

- Tim

On 17 April 2015 at 22:18, Mihael Hategan <hategan at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I think we should remove the intermediate XML (aka. swiftx).
>
> It was initially meant to be an abstract representation (like Java
> bytecode) so that multiple backends could be implemented easily.
> However, the reality is that the XML is a direct representation of the
> swift/K parse tree. The other reality is that the only potential place
> that could have used this as intended (swift/T) didn't.
>
> Here's what happens in the code:
>
> 1. swift parser parses the .swift code and generates a representation of
> the parse tree as StringTemplate objects.
>
> 2. the StringTemplate tree gets serialized to XML using swiftscript.stg
> (a template collection). This gets saved to disk.
>
> 3. XML beans are generated from the schema and the generated XML is
> loaded into a tree of XML Beans.
>
> 4. The Karajan class traverses the XML Beans tree and generates karajan
> code (using StringTemplate objects).
>
> I think that everything between steps 1 and 4 is just Rube Goldberg
> code. It translates the same data structure between StringTemplate to
> XML to XML Beans. It could all (easily I might add) be replaced with
> nice Java classes representing the parse tree.
>
> Opinions?
>
> Mihael
>
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