In the past two weeks I fixed a bug, wrote a hacked together REPL and ported the new bootclasspath functionality to the newast branch. I also started working on fixing the newast branch’s Java source code generator support, but haven’t gotten very far with that yet.
The bug I fixed, #185, was where macros called in a class body that were defined in the class body were blowing up when generating Java source code.
The problem was that the code generator assumed it was inside a method scope when emitting the code for a scoped body. Macros produce a ScopedBody node, so when a macro was called outside a method, it blew up, because @method was nil. The ScopedBody code was making a bad assumption.
I fixed it by special casing the code to check to see whether it was in a method or not. It’s not very pretty, and I’m sure there’s a better way to do it, but it works and I wrote a test for it. The new code checks @method and optionally wraps the call to super. Ugh.
I feel like there’s got to be a way to restructure the code to make this cleaner.
Hacky REPL
I’d been meaning to try putting together a REPL for Mirah for a few months. I’ve got pages of ideas sketched out. There’s some hard problems in making a nice REPL for a statically typed language and it looked like fun. I thought I’d need to learn about bindings and readline and how IRB works, and I never got started (IRB is kind of neat by the way).
Then, last week, I thought to myself “screw all this planning, how hard would it be to just hack something together? Merb wasn’t built in a day.” All interesting software gets its start as a short, clever hack. Why not make my own? So, I hacked something together in a couple hours.
Check it out: gist.github.com/2564819
How does it work? Well, it loops over input–it’s a REPL, waiting for a complete statement and then parses and compiles it. But, it does that in a really hacky way.
First, it doesn’t print each statements value–so it’s not really a REPL, more like a REL, Read Evaluate Line.
Second, it does support multiline statements, but rather than having a nice scanner/partial parser, it just catches syntax errors and eats them if they look like an unfinished statement. Which is pretty crappy.
Finally, and most importantly, it doesn’t have a global binding–this means that you can’t do stuff like this:
because x goes out of scope after the line is evaluated. Fixing this, I think, is the really cool problem in writing a Mirah REPL.
On the other hand, you can define classes and create them, because the REPL uses a shared classloader. So there.
This week AKA plans
- I’d like to fix type inference for blocks for methods that are inherited.
- Get Java source working on newast
- fix some of the dumber bugs on newast