[Cuis-dev] OMeta working again for Cuis 6.3

[Michał Olszewski]

Hi Phil,

Thanks! I was alluding to a past suggestion to use OMeta and Dan 
Amelang's Nile, when they were released back in 2008 as part of VPRI, in 
Squeak Kernel classes to reduce overall complexity of compilation and 
graphics rendering.

And yes, the generated code would be free of any OMeta deps - in this 
case it's simply used as compilation pipeline that transforms input code 
through various compilation stages (AST->AST with optimized special 
sends->bytecode).

It would simplify overall architecture and would perhaps permit to use 
compiler as service for e.g. syntax highlighting or some other stuff 
that requires analysis of source code.

Currently, it seems like, one has to separately implement parser for 
syntax styling etc.

I'm using OMeta for my bachelor thesis (in very very early stages, 
defense is in Feb next year) which is about custom high level dynamic 
streaming language. Pretty much bringing access to high performance 
computations on CPU & GPU to Cuis, without leaving comfort of it :).

I'm going to use it for all stages of compilation (parsing, optimizing, 
generating etc.).

Too early to talk to about details but since I'm going to write the 
thesis, the language is going to be released at least in some usable 
state :) Hopefully more.

Cheers,
Michał

On 11.04.2024 08:05, Phil B wrote:
> Hi Michał,
>
> I'm still around... just been busy with other things. Thanks for your 
> interest and efforts!  I'll take a look at your changes though it will 
> probably be this weekend before I can get to it.
>
> As far as making Cuis a first-class citizen: that's not likely to 
> happen, nor would it be desirable. (I experimented with that and the 
> result was not good... there's too much of an impedance mismatch)
>
> Regarding the other areas you touched on:
> 1) Debugging: there should be a more robust OMeta parser (i.e. a 
> subclass of OMeta2) to better catch more errors (esp. recursion) at 
> parse/compile time, when possible.  It's entirely possible that the 
> syntax needs to be extended to support this.
> 2) Performance: assuming you're talking about runtime performance 
> where you have a parser being called repeatedly you probably want to 
> look at creating a parser that targets (i.e. emits) code for a more 
> performant parser (there's no law that says OMeta has to always target 
> OMeta!) as OMeta's PEG is going to have relatively poor runtime 
> performance vs other parser approaches, especially if you have any 
> recursion in your parser and/or the input to your parser is characters 
> (i.e. parsing data files at runtime, for example.)   I believe that's 
> still an open problem with PEGs. (not sure as I haven't kept up with 
> the state of the art on this)
> 3) Cuis compiling etc: use OMeta to emit Cuis/Smalltalk code that is 
> used anywhere in the image, sure... as long as said emitted code is 
> free of OMeta dependencies.  Put another way: if your generated code 
> is in a subclass of OMeta2 and calls the parsing engine it would 
> probably not be safe enough to use as an image-level dependency, if 
> your generated code is *not* in a subclass of OMeta2 you might be fine.
>
> Thanks,
> Phil
>
> On Wed, Apr 10, 2024 at 4:37 PM Michał Olszewski via Cuis-dev 
> <cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:
>
>     Hi all,
>
>     I fixed OMeta package from pbella so now it works again for Cuis 6.3
>     (>6291). Yay! I made a couple of tests with the grammar
>     definitions and
>     syntax highlighting and so far it's kind of back to the working state:
>
>     https://github.com/michalo1334/OMeta-Cuis
>
>     Just requested pull to original repo:
>     https://github.com/pbella/OMeta-Cuis but not sure if the author is
>     still
>     active in the community.
>
>     However, in OMeta-derived classes it incorrectly highlights instance
>     variables in red and displays := instead of <-. If someone has
>     time to
>     take a quick look at the Shout styler code, would be great. Right now
>     it's an ugly fix so that there is any highlighting at all - it's nice
>     to see a colored text.
>
>     And then there is the problem to make OMeta first class citizen
>     (debugging, improve performance, maybe even use it for Cuis
>     compiling &
>     code generation machinery?).
>
>     Cheers,
>     Michał
>
>     -- 
>     Cuis-dev mailing list
>     Cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st
>     https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/listinfo/cuis-dev
>
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