Hello Everyone, This summer I am following up on the work of two years ago to compile Guile to JS. As some of you may remember from irc back then, I was making good progress until personal circumstances intervened. This year I intend to get it into shape where we can consider including it in Guile.
You can read my GSOC Proposal at http://shift-reset.com/tmp/gsoc3.pdf, but a summary is in order. I was able to compile a large portion of the CPS language (as it existed two years ago) to a Javascript intermediate language, and some transformations, particularly inlining, were performed to improve the readability of the Javascript before emitting it. A boot.js script was written which implemented all the necessary VM primitives in Javascript. The majority of boot-9 was supported, and I had written, compiled (and with some manual tweaking ran) a bunch of programs that handled a large range of what we would expect from Guile, and could handle mutual recursion, keyword arguments, case-lambda, continuations, etc. You can see some of the programs that were compiled and their (very hideous js output) on my site at http://shift-reset.com/pastes/ (e.g. http://shift-reset.com/pastes/mergesort_new_inliner.html was the output of http://shift-reset.com/pastes/merge.html) The main work that needs to be done 1. Move from the previous cps representation to the new cps soup representation 2. Complete porting boot-9 to js (in particular, the guile module system) 3. Cheney on the MTA to handle tail calls for browsers that do not support tail call optimisation. 4. An addition to (scripts) to allow compilation to js, bundling in the new boot.js and necessary libraries. Initially I am working on (1), as this will allow me to take advantage of the work from two years ago. In order to rebase on a current Guile, I think as a stopgap measure it makes sense to bring back the the original cps representation first, and then to change the compiler I wrote to use the new representation afterwards. Once this has been accomplished I will feel comfortable posting a link to let you all play with the stuff from previous years. I will likely then proceed in numerical order. On a personal note, it's good to be back here, paying attention to the Guile project after a hiatus. -- ijp
