From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 24 May 2004 02:58:48 -0400 From: Russ Cox To: Matthew Swank , 9fans <9fans@cse.psu.edu> In-Reply-To: <1085335289.18040.18.camel@kirschwenk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <1085335289.18040.18.camel@kirschwenk> Cc: Subject: [9fans] Re: alef compiler Topicbox-Message-UUID: 861ddab0-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 We could probably get the lawyers to okay releasing the Alef code, but I don't see the good it would do. The Alef compilers generate Plan 9 object files, which, as discussed in the archives, are quite different beasts from standard Unix object files. Further, if you really want to coexist on Unix, you don't want to be in the business of generating your own object files. I suppose you could retrofit the Alef compilers to pipe assembly into as. Libthread provides almost all the run-time support of Alef. It would likely not be hard to write a front end that translated Alef code into C+libthread, but it's even easier just to write in C to begin with, since all the Alef base has been converted. The differences between Alef and C+libthread are almost entirely syntactic. I miss the syntax when I use channels, but I don't miss it enough to make it seem worthwhile to maintain a converter. On my list of ideal changes to my programming environment, Alef syntax isn't very high. I'd much rather see better support for profiling, debugging, garbage collection, and automatically checking correctness. I think making Limbo run on Unix is a lot more interesting than making Alef run on Unix. If anyone wants to try that, I'd be happy to provide code and moral support. Just my opinion. Russ