Re: summer of code ideas

[Noah Lavine]

I've been toying with the idea of an AOT compiler for Guile, and I
think that would make a good summer project.

I think you'd want to compile from Tree-IL to GCC's GIMPLE format (the
highest-level intermediate representation they have, I think). One
interesting possibility would be basing it on Stalin, which compiles
R4RS to C and is apparently extremely good. It's GPL-licensed, but as
far as I know not FSF-copyrighted, so someone would either have to ask
the person for a copyright assignment or reimplement things. Either
way, there would be a substantial amount of work to be done just
getting basic translation to work and integrating with both GCC and
Guile, and then of course we'd like it to optimize things.

Noah

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Andy Wingo <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> We need to get together a few Guile-proposed projects for SoC students
> to hack on.  How about we collect them here in this thread.  I'll kick
> it off with one idea:
>
>  * A CPAN for Guile.  My initial thoughts are that you want a
>    combination of APT-like discovery and download of sources of
>    software, and a stowfs-like local storage, allowing you to update a
>    tree of symlinks in $XDG_DATA_DIRS/guile/2.0/ to add packages, roll
>    back changes, etc.  See
>    http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
>    for more on $XDG_DATA_DIRS.
>
>    C extensions are outside the scope of this project.  IMO a CPAN for
>    Guile should not compile C helper libraries.
>
>    You can start here by doing a survey of what other schemes do:
>    chicken and racket being the obvious ones, and also perhaps taking a
>    look at cabal and other CPAN-alikes developed in the last 10 years.
>
>    You'd need to define a format for code -- tarballs or something.
>    You need to think about signing too, and the possibility both of
>    dumb servers and smart servers.  You'll need to write a web client
>    in Guile, if one hasn't been written yet.  In short, a large project
>    for an ambitious and careful hacker!
>
> Regards,
>
> Andy
> --
> http://wingolog.org/
>
>