Re: Google Summer of Code 2011

[David Given <dg@...>]

On 02/21/11 21:52, Eric Wing wrote:
[...]
> Personally, I think Objective Lua might be the most interesting as a
> student project, but it is also the one I know the least about so I'm
> a little scared about mentoring it.

Objective Lua is, right now, an interesting toy but needs a lot of work
to actually be usable. Currently the requirement that emitted code is
always in the same order as the source code (to make the debug
information work) is forcing me to bend the object model horribly, with
fairly repulsive results. Someone not long ago suggested that this
problem could be solved by postprocessing stack traces, which would
allow the object model to be considerably simplified and generally made
saner.

Plus, there are some bugs to be fixed; things like my Exciting Hack to
make @try...@catch work causes the contents of ... to change inside the
exception handler, etc; not to mention fundamental issues in catching
untyped exceptions.

Bolting it on to an Objective C backend would appear to make a great
deal of sense but there seem to be conceptual impedance mismatches
between LuaCocoa and Objective Lua at the moment. Hopefully changing
olua's object model could solve these.

I suspect that currently Objective Lua's main usefulness is that it
contains a fairly complete recursive descent Lua parser (albeit with a
few shortcuts) that can be plausibly ripped out and used in other projects.

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