Status of Redline

Just Curious.  What is the status of Redline.  What exactly can it do
at the
moment?

Hi Michael,

Not sure how much background you have so forgive me if you know some
of this already.

We did a reboot towards the end of last year when we realized that the
turning smalltalk
into java source and then compiling was, while much simpler, not going
to create a real
smalltalk with all the dynamism that one would expect. That reboot
basically meant that
we tossed out a lot of work ( which we can hopefully reuse a decent amount of ).

We've spent most of the last month working out an ANTLR grammar to replace
the previous one that deals with edge cases well. The previous one which used
backtracking went from quite snappy to incredibly slow when dealing
with a couple
edge cases. After multiple stabs at it, we are pretty sure we have a
rock solid grammar
that isn't going to have issues with any parsing and is going to be
blazingly fast.

We've spent the last week or so arguing about what a smalltalk file
syntax should look
like and soliciting outside thoughts on various ideas. We have an
initial syntax in place
which is probably going to change ( I don't think James will disagree
with me on that. ).
But, it is much better than the chunk format that we were working with before.

At this moment, I'm working on an emacs mode for redline and rebooting the sunit
port. Hopefully a good chunk of the class library will follow after
that but we could
really use help.

In terms of underpinnings, we are feeling pretty confident that we
have everything in
place to push forward towards an initial alpha/beta offering. It might
not be the most
performant runtime ever but, it should be correct and as dynamic as a
smalltalk should be.

Some upcoming points/comments:

* Flesh out a class library based on features we need to do a couple
initial ideas
   we have for stuff we want to do ( more details if you want ).
* Once class library is there and correctness verified, more
performance improvements.

We'd love help getting the class library in place. Ideally, we want
people to start with an
idea of I want to do X. Then start to try to do X and add the class
library stuff needed.
Our plan is to be compatible with Pharo as much as possible  ( more
details on that if you want ).
But, if someone simply wants to 'adopt a class' or two and implement
them, no one is going
to argue with you.

I personally want to be running decent web applications on redline by
the end of the summer.
I tend to vacillate between being way too optimistic about things and
way too pessimistic so...
James might want to chime in for where he sees things landing.

Coming up soon, we will be moving conversation out into public here on
the list and you
can see all the gory details. And now... for the reverse... tl;dr... (
did you make it to here ).

You aren't going to pick up redline and build a real app in the next
few months. The exact
timeline is unknown  ( we have fulltime jobs )... help via
contributions ( email us here,
twitter at us, or email us in private if you are that sort, or pay us
to do work fulltime ) are
greatly appreciated. Personally, I hope that when we get a little
further along, people will
jump on board. I recognize that as most of what we have done is behind
closed doors and
people haven't seen the progress, the starts and stops, the making
sure the foundation is
correct that, things could look to some a little vaporware-ish... but
it isn't. We are pushing
hard on this and crossed a couple important humps lately and everyone
should start
expecting to see a lot more in the next couple months.

I'm sure James will have his take on things and will chime in. Hopefully it will
be less verbose than mine.... but... he gets excited about this too so
it probably won't be.

-Sean-

willing to take redline smalltalk anytime i'm free... seriously...

twitter: @SeanTAllen
email: [hidden email]
gtalk: [hidden email]
snail mail: 214 franklin street apt 305, brooklyn ny 11222 USA





On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Michael Atkisson <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Just Curious.  What is the status of Redline.  What exactly can it do
> at the
> moment?
>