PDS Aftermath. Which way NQP?

Peter Lobsinger plobsing at gmail.com
Wed Feb 2 03:18:48 UTC 2011


On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 7:43 PM, Mike Heise <michael.b.heise at gmail.com> wrote:
> Isn't Winxed already roughly JS with minimal changes to access Parrot internals?

This is a common misconception that I'd like to be cleared up if we
are to seriously consider Winxed as a language for this purpose. It is
superficially similar to JavaScript in syntax, but it is by no means a
clone, and anyone familiar with JavaScript will find this out within
the first 5 minutes (I *have* written code that is valid and
equivalent in JavaScript and Winxed, but it is no cakewalk). This
isn't a bad thing though. Many aspects not copied from JavaScript are
clumsy, inappropriate for Parrot, or otherwise undesirable. For
example, the object system in Winxed is a straightforward mapping of
Parrot's object system, whereas JavaScript's prototype-based object
system would require some heroics to get working under Parrot
currently.

I would describe Winxed as another language in the C tradition,
influenced by JavaScript with touches of C#, which delegates most of
its runtime behaviour to the intelligent defaults built into Parrot.

Based on the above I would say the only of chromatic's criteria met by
Winxed is "more pleasant to write than PIR". There is not a long
history for this language, nor does it have a published standard. I
even have some difficulty in describing the language as "small"
(smaller than NQP, certainly; but not minimalist, which could reduce
problems in a tight bootstrap-loop).

Of the languages currently implemented on Parrot, as they are
currently implemented, I'd say Winxed is the most suitable.

If we were to attempt to meet all of the criteria set forth by
chromatic, I'd suggest we look at much smaller languages (think
scheme, forth, etc), both for the bootstrap-tightness issue mentioned
above, and for reduced burden of language maintenance generally. I
trust, however, that these are not more pleasant than PIR for a
sufficient number of Parrot developers.


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