GSoC: Here We Go Again

My proposal for Google's Summer of Code 2012 has been accepted!

If you were paying attention last year, I started getting somewhat disheartened about my PCT to bytecode project at the end due to performance and other issues. I proposed a new library that I called PACT for Parrot's Alternate Compiler Toolkit. Dukeleto and Whiteknight took the idea seriously and pushed me to flesh out my ideas. My quick 130 line gist has become 700 lines of documentation and 700 lines of code.

Well, this year I'm going to work on fleshing out that documentation and starts of code into a real library. The goal is to have a set of classes that represent bytecode (subs, labels, registers, constants, etc.) and the tools to convert between those classes and bytecode. In addition, there will be an assembly language with associated assembler and disassembler.

It'll be a busy summer for me, but I look forward to making real progress on this projects. I've already been working on converting PCT to Winxed both to improve PCT's hackability and to familiarize myself with the language. This first pass is just to get a more-or-less direct conversion of the existing PIR. There will be a lot of rough edges and strange-looking code. But hopefully this will provide a basis for people to actually work on the code again and get it into a better shape.