Itcy-BitC closures and curries

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

I hadn't been aware of BitC surfacing here on the D discussion group.
I want to be careful to respect the fact that this is a place for
discussing D, but many of the objectives of the two languages are
similar, so as long as Walter doesn't feel I'm intruding it may be
useful to share some ideas and thoughts.

The current BitC implementation does not have a GC. For prototype
purposes we rely on the Boehm collector. I'm well aware of the
pitfalls of that collector from bitter experience, and we view it as
a placeholder solution only. Given where we are at the moment, it
would be very easy to implement Fergus Henderson's techniques, and
contrary to what the MAGPIE people have to say, that extends pretty
readily to multithreading. The problem with the Henderson technique
is that it doesn't address inter-operation with C code. Boehm, in any
case, is certainly good enough to serve for bootstrap purposes, and
eventually we'll go to native code in any case.

While we are interested in stack allocation, I don't have any plan to
put energy into automating that at this time. It's an important
optimization, but right now we're focused on trying to get the
language specification, its formal semantics, and its final surface
syntax nailed down. I have a list of issues on my semantics "hit
list" for that, and that's where my main attention is going.


shap (Jonathan S. Shapiro)