Jorge Ressia wrote: > Hi, > > Marcus Denker and myself will be working on the New Compiler for > Pharo. And once again I ask. Why can this not be a New Compiler for everyone? Why can it not be a "New Compiler, full stop" as a black box, that will work for anyone who interfaces to it in a certain way?
1) I am not asking you to be backward compatible. 2) Thinking about it in this way will help you to design to be more modular and to not make too many assumptions about the rest of the system. 3) Having a wider audience encourages documentation. 3) Additional benefits come from a wider potential deployment and testing. 4) It will benefit you to get used to the compiler being a loadable, pluggable (unpluggable?) module. It will encourage others to code the rest of pharo in such a way as to not tie it in to closely. You may also architect for the Compiler being a loadable/switchable chunk that can be swapped atomically, and reverted if things go wrong. 5) If you get the interfaces right, others may contribute alternative compilers within the framework. I don't think that others understand my expectation for 3.11+ is not for squeak to remain compatible at all costs, but to envisage a platform that can handle big changes. Not in an evolutionary way as pharo is doing, but in a revolutionary way such as Rio is doing. Your announcement that you are "doing a new compiler" is exactly the kind of revolutionary enhancement that we are eager to be able to adopt. If you think about it, you will probably run the Pharo-old and pharo-new alongside for a while until Pharo-new becomes ready enough to be a step change. I believe that progress for squeak will be best made in carefully crafted step changes, and I have fully expected new compiler be one such change. Marcus seems upset by the way he feels he has been treated by the squeak community in the past. But I am not part of that past, I arrived (from ST/X) in the 3.8/3.9 era. We are in a new phase now, that of finding ways to embrace the progress that others make, and seeking to make use of it. thanks in advance Keith _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
