[DotGNU]New project announcement - libjit

[Rhys Weatherley]

Hi all,

While on sabbatical from pnet, I've been coding feverishly on a new project 
under the DotGNU banner called "libjit" (and you thought that I was taking 
things easy :-) ).

The libjit library implements Just-In-Time compilation functionality. Unlike 
other JIT's, this one is designed to be independent of any particular virtual 
machine bytecode format or language. The hope is that Free Software projects 
can get a leg-up on proprietry VM vendors by using this library rather than 
spending large amounts of time writing their own JIT from scratch.

This JIT is also designed to be portable to multiple archictures. If you run 
libjit on a machine for which a native code generator is not yet available, 
then libjit will fall back to interpreting the code. This way, you don't need 
to write your own interpreter for your bytecode format if you don't want to.

The development page on my Web site is now live, with a preliminary version 
that you can download and play with.  I'm still about a week or two away from 
running real code, but wanted to release this early look so that people can 
start helping out with new backends, optimizers, and any other cool ideas 
that you can think of.

    http://www.southern-storm.com.au/libjit.html

Norbert has created a new mailing list called "address@hidden" 
for discussing the development of this new project.  Right now it is 
independent of pnet (that's the point), but we'll eventually modify pnet to 
use it for JIT'ing.

Cheers,

Rhys.