[gobo-eiffel-develop] Re: [gobo-eiffel] new open source eiffel compiler?

[Eric B. <er...@go...>]

Hi Todd

Todd Courtois Stellanova wrote:
> Have you already created an open-source project (e.g. on sourceforge) 
> for yor new ECMA Eiffel compiler?  I would like to help with 
> development and testing, and I'm sure there are others who would like 
> to help as well. 

The compiler is part of the Gobo Eiffel project which is hosted here:

    https://sourceforge.net/projects/gobo-eiffel/

You'll need to "bootstrap" the project by following the instructions in
$GOBO/work/bootstrap/Readme.txt. Then the compiler root class is in
$GOBO/src/gec, and most of its source code is part of the library
$GOBO/library/tools.

As I already said in other messages, the compiler is in its early state.
Currently it can already compile itself, but I need to finish the work
on the kernel classes in order to make it more usable.

I plan to proceed as follows. First I want to finish the core of the
compiler and make it able to compile the whole Gobo package. I will
not ask help before reaching this state because I would end up spending
more time explaining why things do not work yet rather than implementing
them. When the core of the compiler will be ready, then it will be a
good time to receive some feedback from the first users as well as some
contributions from other developers.

> I'm especially interested in ensuring that the compiler can be used 
> to generate code compatible with several mobile phone platforms.  
> After the release of SE 1.0 I worked on a branch (MobileEiffel: 
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/mobeiffel)  that generated C and Java
> code runnable on several major mobile device targets. This worked 
> reasonably well, but I had to strip some thread-unsafe features.  The 
> thread safety issue remains in SE 2.x, along with new problems you've 
> already pointed out, and SE still provides no support for 
> SCOOP/"separate", which is a major issue on mobile device platforms. 

I don't plan to implement multithreading or SCOOP in the first versions
of the compiler, but this is definitely something that could be taken
care of by people who would like to add this functionalities to the
compiler. There are other things for which I would need help, such as
debugging and profiling support. But for that to be productive, I
think that I need to finish the core of the compiler first.

-- 
Eric Bezault
mailto:er...@go...
http://www.gobosoft.com