A Bootstrapping Infrastructure to Build and Extend Pharo-Like Languages

Polito, Guillermo; Ducasse, Stephane; Fabresse, Luc; Bouraqadi, Noury

Document type :

Communication dans un congrès avec actes

DOI :

10.1145/2814228.2814236

Title :

A Bootstrapping Infrastructure to Build and Extend Pharo-Like Languages

Author(s) :

Polito, Guillermo [Auteur]

Centre for Digital Systems [CERI SN - IMT Nord Europe]
Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution [RMOD]
Ducasse, Stephane [Auteur]

Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution [RMOD]
Fabresse, Luc [Auteur]
Centre for Digital Systems [CERI SN - IMT Nord Europe]
Bouraqadi, Noury [Auteur]
Centre for Digital Systems [CERI SN - IMT Nord Europe]

Conference title :

Onward!

City :

Pittsburg

Country :

Etats-Unis d'Amérique

Start date of the conference :

2015-06-21

English keyword(s) :

Traits
OOP
Bootstrapping
Meta-programming
PHARO

HAL domain(s) :

Informatique [cs]/Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

English abstract : [en]

Bootstrapping is well known in the context of compilers, where a bootstrapped compiler can compile its own source code. Bootstrapping is a beneficial engineering practice because it raises the level of abstraction of a ...
Show more >Bootstrapping is well known in the context of compilers, where a bootstrapped compiler can compile its own source code. Bootstrapping is a beneficial engineering practice because it raises the level of abstraction of a program making it easier to understand, optimize, evolve, etc. Bootstrapping a reflective object-oriented language is however more challenging , as we need also to initialize the runtime of the language with its initial objects and classes besides writing its compiler. In this paper, we present a novel bootstrapping infrastructure for Pharo-like languages that allows us to easily extend and modify such languages. Our bootstrapping process relies on a first-class runtime. A first-class runtime is a meta-object that represents a program's runtime and provides a MOP to easily load code into it and manipulate its objects. It decou-ples the virtual machine (VM) and language concerns by introducing a clear VM-language interface. Using this process, we show how we succeeded to bootstrap a Smalltalk-based language named Candle and then extend it with traits in less than 250 lines of high-level Smalltalk code. We also show how we can bootstrap with minimal effort two other languages (Pharo and MetaTalk) with similar execution semantics but different object models. Acknowledgments We thank the European Smalltalk User Group for their support (www.esug.org).Show less >

Language :

Anglais

Peer reviewed article :

Oui

Audience :

Internationale

Popular science :

Non

Collections :

Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille (CRIStAL) - UMR 9189

Source :

Harvested from HAL

Files

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01185812/document
Open access
Access the document

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01185812/document
Open access
Access the document

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01185812/document
Open access
Access the document

document
Open access
Access the document

Poli15a-Onward-Bootstrapping.pdf
Open access
Access the document

A Bootstrapping Infrastructure to Build ... BibTeX CSV Excel RIS

Files

A Bootstrapping Infrastructure to Build ...

BibTeX

CSV

Excel

RIS