MiniD dsource project set up

[Rémy Mouëza]

In article <e7ngne$a46$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Jarrett Billingsley says...
>
>Link: http://www.dsource.org/projects/minid
>
>== What is MiniD? ==
>
>MiniD is a statically-typed, object-oriented scripting language based on D 
>and designed with D in mind as the host language.  It takes some features 
>from other scripting languages as well, such as static closures, generators, 
>and coroutines.  One of the main ideas behind making it D-based is an almost 
>seamless integration of scripting into the host program, so that native code 
>can very easily call script code and vice versa.
>
>== How far along is it? ==
>
>It's mostly just a grammar and some language specs right now; however, 
>there's a reference compiler in the works which does the lexical and 
>syntactic passes, and has the beginnings of the semantic pass as well.  It 
>can be found into the repo.
>
>== Is it open?  Licensing? ==
>
>It's open.  Licensing?  It could be public domain for all I care.  If some 
>of you more experienced OSS'ers have some comments on that, or if I should 
>use something else (like zlib or MIT license), I'd like to hear it.  In 
>fact, if someone wanted to bring it up on the MiniD forum on dsource, that'd 
>be great.
>
>The development is also open.  I'd love to hear any ideas and suggestions 
>for features and other areas of development.
>
>== Why MiniD? ==
>
>It started as a sort of for-fun project, but eventually developed into 
>something of a learning project.  I wanted to see what it was like to design 
>and implement a compiler and VM.  Maybe I'll end up with a language that 
>people want to use; maybe not.  In any case, it's my idea that perhaps by 
>offloading things like typechecking into the compiler, the VM will be 
>somewhat faster.  Maybe.  I hope :) 
>

Sorry, I don't want to be offensive, but I don't see lots of "interest" of doing
a scripting language so close to D, althought without adding any "new" stuff
that are typical of dynamic language.

The way I see it : D has lot of strength and weaknesses. What about doing a
dynamic language that would make a kind of balance by supporting features that
would releave D where it kind of fails ? From what I have seen, this is not what
MiniD is planning to do. And maybe it is not what you intended to do.

First, I would either leave the strongly typing system for something more
dynamic ( more like scripting language ), or keep it strong but would make much
more type inference, going beyond what D is doing, something looking like
Nemerle.

Second, I would implement some symbolic stuff or some kind of reflection to
manipulate the type system or make something like meta object protocol to be
able to programatically transform the MiniD programs. This could allow for
aspect oriented stuffs and more. 

Actually, I think that I am too demanding with a for-fun project. Maybe I should
keep quiet and implement my own Pythonish/Smalltalkish language in D. 

Anyway, D is a high level programming language, with features closed to dynamic
languages and high performance. I think it's the language of choice to implement
a scripting language. The more scripting language implemention we'll have, the
best we'll be able to prove it. 

MiniD is a good idea. 
Good luck !