Hi all, I had an opportunity to visit VPRI on Monday and Tuesday, and I just wanted to write a little "field trip report" to the list so that you understand a little more of the big picture of the STEPS project. I expect that this information will all be really obvious for people who have actually worked with some of the folks at VPRI.
Also, as always, you should remember that I don't speak for VPRI itself: I'm just a volunteer contributor who is interested in what is going on with STEPS. I met many of the people listed on http://vpri.org/html/people/team.html What I understood is that the researchers are encouraged to go out in all directions (of course, there are also deadlines to be able to demonstrate an aspect of the system to an interested third party). Even if there are failures, and many throwaway prototypes, they are looking for the "miracles" that are expected to bridge the gap between the computer hardware and the user experience with powerful and reusable ideas. Another interesting thing is that it's really only Ian who is working on the low-level stuff. The majority of the user interface experimentation is being done in Squeak and Javascript. I would love to encourage the developers to release some of those cool demos, but that's up to them. It really looks like the next version of Jolt (in progress) will be a serious contender to use as the basis of all the other experiments. Ian and I spent a number of hours on Tuesday hashing out the details for the next Jolt compiler, both the programming interface and the implementation. It will handle the cases of dynamic compiling (when you directly load a source file into the running Jolt), and static compilation (when you load some portions, such as syntax, but compile the rest into a binary file) including cross-compilation. Ian also redesigned the Id object model to make it simpler and more flexible, which drastically reduced the size of libid. All this means it will be feasible to implement libid in Jolt and port idc to use Jolt as its backend. There have been some questions about nomenclature. One thing I learned is that the "IS" system referred to in the yearly report that was published is the same COLA/Jolt/idst that Ian has committed to Subversion. -- Michael FIG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> //\ http://michael.fig.org/ \// _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
