We were just discussing GSoC a bit, and another idea occurred to me:
- Survey existing language implementations and how they're solving similar problems like POSIX, code generation/compilation, parsing, and so on, and work with project leads to pull out common solutions into reusable APIs.
This would be a huge help to all such language projects, since we all really want to work together but we're generally swamped with fixes and whatnot for our own projects. It would even be possible to narrow the focus a bit, such as to take on POSIX and use Tom Enebo's current library in JRuby as a base to start building out complete JVM POSIX support for all languages. If you're interested in helping JVM languages succeed, this would be a great way to help them all at once.
I've been thinking for awhile this is a crucial step for the JVM languages meta-project, as all those fabled 200+ languages will be worth a lot more if we learn from what their authors already took care of. It does require more openness and a welcoming attitude to include (all those) languages that never hit the mainstream, though. Also, I'd suggest you start at home, and pick Per Bothner's brain regarding Kawa, which already has a large, tested library for generating bytecode (which was used in the quite-cool language Nice, for example). Hope you can pull this task off.
ReplyDeleteRegards
Patrick