Re: [DotGNU]Melody

[Barry Fitzgerald]

Marco Manfredini wrote:
> 
> > 3. Make the DotGNU platform support Melody-based Portable
> >    Executables as a third portable executable format in
> >    addition to the two portable executable formats (those based
> >    on Java bytecode and IL) that we already want to support.
> >
> 
> No. The idea is to make Melody strong enough to generate Java or IL if
> required, thus requiring only one portable executable format for all
> times. And since it is a machine and language independent format, which
> describes the expression structure [compareable with the AST phase of a
> compiler] and not with registers or stacks, it should be even easy to
> implement the transformations to Java or IL. This is another benefit of
> not using a bytecodes: Imaginge you'd have to convert IL to JavaVM or
> vice versa. Difficult task.
> 
> But the main application of Melody is IMHO to generate applications from
>   Melody-units (Since I like with musical terminology so much, because
> of the correspondence between music and code, allow me to call "a unit
> of melody code" a tune). So we take tunes, put them together into a
> nifty optimizer and inliner, create one large tune and feed it into the
> gcc backend which generates optimized code for a machine.
> 
> Greetings
> Marco


To add some more weight to this idea, if we distributed DotGNU portable
application formats in something like melody, it would be possible to
convert the applications to java bytecode or IL on the fly, but a person
wouldn't be able to interpret a distributed melody package without
DotGNU until after they compiled down to boytecode or IL with a DotGNU
platform interpreter.  In other words, this could also help us lock out
proprietary vendors for some time.

        -Barry