Current reading

Following the announcement of Mozilla Tamarin - the adaptation of Adobe's ActionScript virtual machine to give JIT compilation of JavaScript in Gecko applications, and the starting up of the SmallTalk.rb project to get Ruby running on a better VM, I've been doing a bit of reading:

StrongTalk - fast, typed smalltalk
- interestingly, unlike ActionScript, the typing is orthogonal to the speed optimisations
- everything is implemented as mixins, functions which add features to classes

Mirrors - a mechanism for separating reflection and conventional object APIs

JS Typechecking via JS-Sourcerer or a more formal approach which I don't know half the notation of
- JS-Sourcerer doesn't have a model for the interfaces to XUL, and doesn't accept IDL to define it (though it should be possible to create an IDL to its proprietary type definition language)
- there's also a more complete modal type model; I need to investigate more of the theory here, and here.
- at the least you can infer types at any execution point and then assume that changes to object's or prototypes relaxes assumptions
- I need to find whether most type inference systems for dynamic languages are Prolog-like, and whether a Rete-like system is more suitable for dynamic languages
- assuming the cost of the inference actually is worth it in execution terms; it may be better to do some pattern matching then allow constraint violations to push execution back to the interpreter. So choosing an inference engine which is suited to the pattern matching may be more important.
- Type Feedback vs. Concrete Type Inference - maybe TI in the bytecode generator, then TF in the VM?

And, in other news, there's the re-branding of the Semantic Web as Web3.0. Personally, I've been using Web3 for community driven 3D on the web. Let's see if RDF hacking get as popular as World of Warcraft machinima or Virtual Life bartering.


TME