Hi Brian,
I've only read a few pages of the Slate site so far but it's brought back fond memories of image based systems I played with in the 80s.
(I've done a total of about 5 years worth of professional programming over the last 30 years, primarily assembler and BCPL in the 80s and some Pascal and Perl in the 90s; I've played with many langs -- lisp, snobol, the toy smalltalkish systems Smalltalk/V and Actor, etc. -- in the late 80s; I'm currently a Perl 6 "enthusiast" -- my periodic HN search for "perl6" caught your mention of it.)
If you have little to no idea what NQP [1] is, then my question is:
What are the characteristics that a language/compiler/runtime/library have to have to adequately support an image based approach? I'm imagining OO; source code as objects; running code as objects; object serialization; incremental compilation; etc. I know I should research this myself (and will, now you've rekindled my interest) but I think your off-the-cuff answer will be an interesting and valuable start for me and perhaps others.
Or, in the unlikely event that you DO know what NQP is, then my question is:
Is it reasonable to think about building an image based system using the NQP toolchain?
Thank you offering AMA. :)
[1] https://github.com/perl6/nqp
I've only read a few pages of the Slate site so far but it's brought back fond memories of image based systems I played with in the 80s.
(I've done a total of about 5 years worth of professional programming over the last 30 years, primarily assembler and BCPL in the 80s and some Pascal and Perl in the 90s; I've played with many langs -- lisp, snobol, the toy smalltalkish systems Smalltalk/V and Actor, etc. -- in the late 80s; I'm currently a Perl 6 "enthusiast" -- my periodic HN search for "perl6" caught your mention of it.)
If you have little to no idea what NQP [1] is, then my question is:
What are the characteristics that a language/compiler/runtime/library have to have to adequately support an image based approach? I'm imagining OO; source code as objects; running code as objects; object serialization; incremental compilation; etc. I know I should research this myself (and will, now you've rekindled my interest) but I think your off-the-cuff answer will be an interesting and valuable start for me and perhaps others.
Or, in the unlikely event that you DO know what NQP is, then my question is:
Is it reasonable to think about building an image based system using the NQP toolchain?
Thank you offering AMA. :)
[1] https://github.com/perl6/nqp