[Mono-dev] New Language Integration

[London Disney]

@ Rafael

Thanks for the information. It was very useful indeed.

I'll need to learn about the IL, which I think I can find lots of
resources out there.

But I also like to understand, a bit more, how the Mono VM for
MacOSX works; could you show me what resources are good please?
The Mono Hackers page on the wiki is very old...

I can start building the VM but then that doesnt give me much
information about the design ?





On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Rafael Teixeira <monoman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi London,
>
> First answering your latest question: Yes, Monodevelop is mostly written in
> C#.
>
> Back to what I could understand as your main question:
>
> To write a compiler for a new language that will run on Mono/,NET, you can:
> -1- Write it in C#, or another Managed Language. The main advantage
> here is to have access to libraries that already do the hard work of
> generating the binaries (IL code) that your compiler should produce.
> Additionally if you choose C#, you can look at some good compilers
> already written with like Mono's own C# compiler (mcs) or Boo's
> compiler (booc).
> -2- Write it with some non-managed but well supported language, like
> C/C++/Objective-C/Java. It is quite harder to generate managed-code
> binaries this way.
> -3- Write it with your own language (that was what we at Mono did with
> our C# compiler), but that mandates that you have some other compiler
> for your language available to "bootstrap" the process (we used MS's
> csc in Windows until the point that mcs could compile itself at which
> point we switched to use a previous stable version of mcs to build the
> newer versions).
>
> For a totally new language, you probably could use a mix of 1 and 3:
> build a minimal compiler in some stable language and them use it to
> build a compiler in your own new language. That was the intent with
> Boo, but AFAIK Boo devs could not find time yet to migrate the
> compiler from C# to Boo, itself.
>
> Another take on an educational project, you could use Boo
> extensibility features to cook a derived-tailored-improved language
> (Boo makes it easy to write DSLs Domain Specific Languages).
>
> Hope it helps,
>
>
> Rafael "Monoman" Teixeira
> ---------------------------------------
> "To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative
> only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you
> want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a
> little more dance to it."
> Osho
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 7:56 AM, London Disney
>  <disney.london at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> > That thread has lots of useful information actually but I might
> > have confused you. We use Mono/C# to make addins don't we?
> > I like to go a bit deeper to C/C++/ObjC level in MacOSX.
> >
> > What I was asking in my first email was something mentioned
> > in this page:
> >
> > http://www.mono-project.com/Contributing
> >
> > at the end it says "The educational way is an interesting one...".
> >
> > I was looking for an "educational" project and so my question
> > was if you could show me a road map to get started on something
> > like that.
> >
> > I am interested in "a compiler for a new language" but
> > "Mono VM extensions in C" or
> > "improving Mono performance" are also very educational...
> >
> > Let me put it this way: How did you write C# itself before it existed ?
> > That's what I like to learn.
> >
> > I guess my source of confusion is that MonoDevelop is written
> > entirely or mostly in C# ? Is that right ?
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 5:34 AM, Michael Hutchinson
> > <m.j.hutchinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 7:47 PM, London Disney
> >> <disney.london at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >> > @Michael
> >> > Hi
> >> >
> >> > I'm not intending to be a Mono user. Getting involved with Mono
> >> > and MonoDevelop under MacOSX is what I am after.
> >> >
> >> > I chose implementing a front-end because it can get me involved
> >> > a lot -- or may be I'm wrong? This can, say, tell me how to alter
> >> > some part of the implementation to suit my needs.
> >> >
> >> > So do you have a better suggestion ?
> >>
> >> Just to clarify, do you mean a MonoDevelop addin as a frontend for an
> >> existing language, or a new compiler?
> >>
> >> If the former, you may find
> >>
> >>
> http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/monodevelop-list/2010-January/011003.html
> >> useful (and the preceding thread on the MonoDevelop list).
> >>
> >> --
> >> Michael Hutchinson
> >> http://mjhutchinson.com
> >
> >
>  > _______________________________________________
> > Mono-devel-list mailing list
> > Mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
> > http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-devel-list
> >
> >
>
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