I guess that's perhaps what people are more familiar with, but I don't think the term "meta-circular" should be limited to interpreters. I was using it in the same way as the Klein project (SELF in SELF) did. Perhaps the term "self-hosted" is more descriptive. The goal is for Tachyon to compile itself, and to eventually use Tachyon for the development of Tachyon, with the aim of simplifying the design, and perhaps eventually have Tachyon optimize itself. At the very least, I've found that this is a good case of "eating your own dog food". It has certainly helped me better understand the JS semantics.
- Maxime On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 6:27 PM, Brendan Eich <bren...@mozilla.com> wrote: > On Oct 31, 2011, at 1:38 PM, Mike Samuel wrote: > > > 2011/10/31 Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert <maximechevali...@gmail.com>: > >> Hello, > >> I recently presented a paper about Tachyon, a research (meta-circular) > >> JavaScript VM implementation at DLS 2011. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt suggested > that > >> I join this list and mention our effort, to get in touch with other JS > >> implementers, and perhaps get some feedback/suggestions or > contributions. > >> Tachyon is a JavaScript VM written in (extended) JavaScript. It uses a > pure > >> JIT targetting x86/x86-64. We aim to eventually support the full ES5 > spec. > >> We have support for most of it, but we're still missing important > features > >> such as a GC, floating-point support and exceptions. Tachyon's > development > >> is funded in part by Mozilla. > > > > Could you explain how this differs from other meta-circular > > interpreters like Narcissus? > > Is it correct to say that this is not a tree-interpreter like > > Narcissus, but a JavaScript to native compiler written in JS. > > I was asking Mike privately why he asked about this, and he answered that > the "meta-circular" term suggested to him that there's a Tachyon > interpreter or tower of evaluators. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-circular_evaluator > > I'm not an expert on "meta-circular" terminology, just curious to learn. > > /be
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