Higher-Order

Jeene: Status

I am happy that Jeene was mentioned on Ajaxian today. This is good it means that the project is more likely to attract potential contributors which is nice since there is quite some work yet to be done.

I thought, I would provide a status update on Jeene and a “backlog” of work that needs to be done.

What is working:

• Partial evaluation of simple operations: ‘+’, ‘-’, ‘&&’ and ‘||’
• code generation for ‘function’ expressions and ‘return’ statements

This means that we can run a number of simple examples. For a quick and dirty performance test checkout: performance_simple1

This is all fine, the basic design is in place. Now it is just a matter of “getting it done” to implement other operators. However, there are some constructs that are more difficult:
What I will be working on next

• Assignment. Since an assignment changes the static/dynamic status of variables, this is more advanced than e.g. ‘+’ which doesn’t have side effects. For example if ‘x’ is a static variable and ‘y’ is dynamic, then ‘y = x;’ should cause ‘y’ to be static from that program point.
• Handling of function calls. For now, I will simply replace a function call with a function call where we replace static expressions in the arguments with their values. Later I will consider ‘unrolling’/'inlining’ of function calls.

As always, I welcome anyone interested in contributing. I will run a rule: 1-patch approved = commit rights.