On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 09:47:06AM -0700, chromatic wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 06:30:24AM -0700, Stephane Payrard wrote:
> > > Having it working would be a additional tool.
> > > Indeed, I wanted to tweak the code manually to see the code I needed
> > > the rakudo compiler to generated.
> > >
> > > I have not investigated but I suppose some setting code is missing.
>
> > The code produced by --target=pir won't run standalone, it also
> > needs support code for loading the Perl 6 runtime libraries
> > (i.e., perl6.pbc).
>
> Is it useful to add code to HLLCompiler for this purpose? I've wanted
> something similar in Pheme for a while, and I suspect it would help with
> debugging Tcl and Lua as well.
I'm not certain it belongs mainly in HLLCompiler. To get a .pir
file to run standalone we essentially need an anonymous :main sub
somewhere in the --target=pir output that does:
1. load the runtime library (e.g. load_bytecode 'perl6.pbc')
2. process command line arguments similar to what HLLCompiler and
the HLL would do
3. invoke the primary sub that was generated by --target=pir
For #1, it would be good if the runtime library is kept in a
standard location -- I don't think that hardcoding the languages/perl6
path is good for this. I suppose the compiler .pbc files could
go into .../runtime/parrot/library/ but that feels a little wrong to
me. (See also RT#47992, which discusses providing a standard location
for compiler runtimes.)
For #2 we can't just call the 'command_line' method provided by HLLCompiler,
because that's processing --target= and other options that really aren't
applicable to an already-compiled .pir file. Also, some command line
options may end up being specific to the HLL, and thus are better handled
by the HLL runtime rather than HLLCompiler itself.
Anyway, this is something would be good to research achieving in Rakudo,
but it will require a fair bit of refactoring in perl6.pir to move things
out of the current :main and into :load :init subs. Again, the trickiest
part at the moment is getting command-line arguments into the appropriate
location (I have a few ideas about this that I'll try shortly).
Pm
