Re: bytecode unification for scripting languages

[Reini Urban <rurban@x-ray.at>]

I saw recently a second open-source CIL project, which already has a 
working compiler against gcc, besides mono. 
but I forgot its name. it was on freshmeat last month. 

of course mono will be bigger, but I really doubt that it will be "good
enough".
  continuations (probably not), 
  proper tail-call elimination (hopefully)
  other efficiency hacks in the OO design (hmm), 
  fairly good gc (most likely)
  type system???

Michael Vanier schrieb:
> "Sorta-kinda-open source" is not the same as open source.  The Mono project
> (http://www.go-mono.net), if it happens, might overcome this objection.
> 
> > Why not take the CIL/CLR spec and build a really great implementation
> > of it instead?  Here's an opportunity where Linux and the Open Source
> > movement can completely embarass Microsoft.  Be the first to provide a
> > free and openly hackable implementation of it, well before Microsft
> > does, and make the Linux version run five times as fast as the Windows
> > version.  Now *there* would be something impressive.
> 
> Again, the Mono project comes to mind as having exactly this goal.
> However, a separate issue is whether the same intermediate language will
> work equally well for statically compiled languages like C# and java and
> for dynamic languages like most scripting languages and scheme.  For
> instance, how hard will it be to implement scheme efficiently on top of
> CIL/CLR?  If it's easy, then you're right; there's no reason to needlessly
> duplicate functionality.  OTOH I can imagine that a portable bytecode
> designed explicitly for highly dynamic languages might be a very different
> beast.
-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/