Hello world again ( 2015-07-01 )

After almost a year of rewrite: Hello World is back.

Working executables again

So much has changed in the last year it is almost impossible to recap. Still a little summary:

Register Machine

The whole layer of the Register Machine as an abstraction was not there. Impossible is was to see what was happening.

Passes

In the beginning i was trying to just do it. implemented Passes to go between them.

The virtual machine design

Thinking about what objects makes up a virtual machine has brought me to a clear understanding of the objects needed. stopped using the machine stack altogether and am using a linked list instead. Recently is has occurred to me that that linked listdoesn’t even change, so it is very simple indeed.

Smaller, though not small, changes

• The Salma Object File format was created.
• The Book was started
• I gave lightning talks at Frozen Rails 2014, Helsinki and Bath Ruby 2015
• I presented at Munich and Zurich user groups, lots to take home from all that

Future

The mountain is still oh so high, but at last there is hope again. The second dip into arm (gdb) debugging has made it very clear that a debugger is needed. Preferably visual, possibly 3d, definitely browser based. So either Opal or even Volt.

Already more clarity in upcoming fields has arrived:

• inlining is high on the list, to code in higher language
• the difference between statement and expression helped to structure code.
• hopefully the debugger / interpreter will help to write better tests too.