[Mono-list] Making a ruby.net compiler

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> > But if you want bits to flag types, you might as well just use those
> > bits and pointers and deal with those in the same way a traditional
> > computer would.
> 
> Doing that would lose verifiability, garbage collection, and conformance
> to the CLS.  So you'd be discarding most of the advantages of the .NET CLR.

All of those problems are relatively easy to solve, but they require
the information to be brought to the table.

The fact that your internal representation is not suited to be exposed
to the CLS does not mean that the compiler can not expose CLS compliant
accessor methods.

I do not know much about the subject, but your bit-tag suggestion is to
used by Lisp compilers.  Lisp compilers to will have problems exposing
list-based APIs to start with, so there is still a significant amount
of work required into wrapping things to be easily consumed by other
CLS languages.

The GC issue is definitely addressable: once you know what you need to
address, and not giving up because the feature is not there yet.

Miguel.