PACT in GSoC 2012

[Jonathan "Duke" Leto]

Howdy,

In general, a big +1. Please start to think about what the formal
proposal will look like so we can give feedback.

I am a big fan of have a few small deliverables that you know you will
be able to accomplish along with a few more ambitious deliverables
that depends on how things progress.

Duke

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Brian Charles Gernhardt
<brian.gernhardt at mail.rit.edu> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I suppose not everybody remembers me from last summer, or from #parrot over the last year, so I'm going to re-introduce myself.
>
> My name is Brian Gernhardt and I'm an MS Student at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  My current focus is programming language theory and compilers, and my thesis[1] is on compiler optimization.  Next year, I will be in a PhD program (school TBD) to do additional research in this field.
>
> Last summer, I worked on porting PAST to NQP so it could use bacek's work on directly generating bytecode[2].  The results of this were somewhat mixed[3].  At the end of that project, and sporadically since then, I've worked on designing a system I've called the Parrot Alternate Computer Toolkit (PACT)[4].  It's a rethink of our currently HLL compiler libraries, designed from the ground-up to directly output bytecode instead of relying on the aging IMCC.  This is an ambitious project, but I think it could bear fruit rather quickly.  The lowest levels could be used to create a PIR alternative, a disassembler, and possibly a backend for a skilled compiler writer.
>
> I hope the community will support me using Summer of Code to start this project.  In one summer, I'm fairly certain I could create a new assembly language for Parrot that has a useful set of classes that could be used in other project and future layers of PACT.  Of course, I'll write up a formal proposal during the application process but wanted to start floating the idea now.
>
> [1] http://www.cs.rit.edu/~bcg2784/
> [2] https://github.com/parrot/parrot/tree/nqp_pct
> [3] http://www.parrot.org/content/end-gsoc-not-time-stop...
> [4] https://github.com/parrot/PACT
>
> ~~ Brian Gernhardt
> benabik on #parrot, #perl6
> MS Student, RIT CS
>
> _______________________________________________
> http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev



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Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jonathan at leto.net>
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