[self-interest] Info about Pep?

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

On Sat, 27 Jan 2001, Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:
> >Would Mario's work to emulate Smalltalk in Self be considered
> >similar.
> 
> Is this a question?
> 
> I don't think so.  Converting Smalltalk to Self is pretty easy compared to 
> converting Java, especially Java bytecode, to Self (or 
> Smalltalk).  Overall, the approach to go is pretty obvious, but quite a few 
> details of the Java VM specification like synchronized methods or 
> exceptions make things difficult if you want to get good performance.

Yes - Smalltalk isn't converted to Self, but actually runs as if Self
were Smalltalk (after a few support objects are added and a patched
parser). For Java, the bytecodes must be translated into Self
bytecodes, which is a lot more work.

> However, the idea is intriguing as not "Java the language" but "Java the 
> waste amount of libraries" is what I'd like to use.  For this, you'd 
> however need to translate bytecode and probably also support JNI.

That wouldn't be easy, but Self does have a foreign language interface
that could be adapted for this.

And in another message:
> Well, the pep paper looks more professional to me that anything I got
> for  frost :-)  When I saw the forst code the first time a few years
> ago, it  looked horrible.  So my hope was, pep is better engineered.
>
> But perhaps Les Tyrell's effort will produce a great tool.

I had the same impression too, but haven't seen Frost and was guessing
that ObjectShare would want to really invest in it.

-- Jecel