progress...

It's been a while since I wrote something the last time. But I have made progress since then.

First of all, the Hello world example has changed again. Here is the new (and hopefully final) version:

import system.stdio

class Hello
 static procedure main()
  system.Out.line("Hello, World!")
 end
end

The 'StdIO' class has been replaced by 'Out', which will provide simple console output. The 'printLn' procedures have been renamed to 'line'.

Implementation of the compiler is now much further. The compiler on SVN trunk now supports the new namespace system, and supports importing 'system.stdio'. This means that all sample programs in the directory tests/programs now compile successfully. A new fun feature is that the compiler detects TODO and FIXME in comments and emits warnings for them. Of course new compiler options are provided to turn these warnings off, but they are enabled by default.

The compiler has been restructured internally as well. I have completed 3 major refactorings. But this is not the end of the road, much other improvements will be done in the future.

There is a good chance that the next release of the compiler will have version number 0.4.0 because of all the improvements that have been done. The milestone for 0.4.0 will then be "front-end mature enough to start implementing the back-end".

I have also created a new SVN branch where I will start to work on the compiler back-end. As said earlier I will use LLVM for this. I have imported LLVM 1.9 into the branch. The first thing to do is to get LLVM compiled with CMake, as the LLVM developers use GNU autotools to build it. But I don't, I use CMake for the front-end. Then I will try to get the Hello World program compiled with it.

Today I have written a bunch of docs again. You can find class references for the built-in types on the website.

I currently use Subversion, but I am thinking about switching to Bazaar.