Hello,
By VB 8 I do mean VB 2005, and it does support all VB 2005 features
(including partial classes and generics) except the My namespace, unless I
missed something.
The parser is written by me, no parsing tools has been used. If this is
good or bad I do not know (I am no compiler guru at all so the code might
not be of a very good quality, but that I would leave to others to judge),
but in fact the MS compiler is also hand-written. I used the Visual Basic
Language Specification 8.0
(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6D50D709-EAA4-44D7-8AF3-E14280403E6E&displaylang=en)
in order to construct the parser, and I don't think it would be easy to
change it all to use a parsing tool now. The advantage is also that the
only executable needed for the moment to compile it all is vbc.exe! First
time I downloaded the mcs compiler some time ago I struggled quite some
time in order to just compile it (on Windows) because I couldn't get the
parsing tool (jay I think it was called) compiled.
The framework for the error reporting is there (it is easy to add a new
error message for a specific condition, it is just a line of code), but
error recovery is not that easy, during parsing no information is recorded
in order to return to a earlier known state. I don't think it would be
hard to implement, it would just take some time and effort.
I will try to upload the currrent code to sourceforge asap so you can have
a look at it.
On Mon, 01 May 2006 02:18:43 +0200, Alexandre Rocha Lima e Marcondes
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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Hello Rolf,
Your project seems to be great ... The idea of a VB.NET compiler
compiling itself is wonderful in my point of view. It would be the
same as mcs (C# compiler compiling itself). I think we should discuss
it a little more and take a look on the code, in order to think about
adopting it as mono VB.NET compiler.
By VB 8 I think you mean VB.NET 2005, so let me ask: do you have
support for partial classes and generics ?
What kind of parser do you have ? Would it be better to have a
parser done by parsing tools instead ?
The error recovery and reporting, is there some prototype code, or
it lacks all the support to these features ?
In my oppinion this would be a great SoC for this year. What do
you think Miguel ?
Rolf Bjarne wrote:
Hello,
I've been working on a vb compiler for some time now as a hobby and
it is
is currently able to compile simple files
correctly. The compiler needs some work in order to be usable, but
nothing
that can't be overcome.
My compiler has the following characteristics:
- It is written in vb, but it does currently not compile itself (I
don't
know if it runs on mono, I tried to use as
little as possible of the vb runtime in the compiler, but it is
completely
impossible not to use it).
- It supports all vb 8 features (except the My namespace for the
moment),
including generics.
- The parser is hand written, and is feature-complete (unless the My
feature requires changes in the parser, but I
don't think so).
Major todos:
- Practically no errors are reported, and no error recovery is
implemented
either.
- Implicit and explicit conversions.
- Debug (pdb) file generation.
I created a sourceforge project some time ago for the compiler
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/vbnc) and some old
code is available in cvs (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/vbnc/),
but this code is not at all close to the
state of the compiler now. If you are interested in having a look at
it I
can upload the current code to svn,
though it may take some time since I have to look through it for things
that are not supposed to be made public.
I can try to adopt the compiler so that it can be used by the Mono
project
(including implementing missing
functionality in the vb runtime), though I am not quite sure how
much work
would be needed. Anyway I'd love to do
this as a Google Summer of Code project, if possible!
Best regards
Rolf Bjarne Kvinge
On Thu, 20 Apr 2006 15:52:09 +0200, Miguel de Icaza <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Hey,
Yesterday I met with Rafael and we discussed a bit what we
wanted to
do with Mono's VB compiler.
The situation is that today's VB compiler is based on a fork of
mcs
circa 2002. And although some of the improvements to mcs made it into
mbas, they were not all incorporated.
To make things worse, the new VB.NET supports generics. So we
are
wondering whether it would not be a better idea to start a fresh fork
from gmcs (along the same proposal that Jambunathan had a year or so
ago) and implement VB that way. Lets call this effort "mbas2".
The idea would be to go in chunks: we could integrate individual
commits that were done to the old mbas tree, and determine one by one
whether it applies to mbas2.
Maybe not all of the code can be salvaged, but if we can get even
40% of the old code migrated into the new tree it would be a big plus.
Now, this might be insane, because once I was talking to
someone on
the VB.NET team and when I told them how mbas was written he said
"I did
not think that VB.NET could be implemented that way". Maybe our
approach is completely busted, but I do not know enough about
VB.NET to
know. I just know that if the original mbas idea made sense, we
should
probably start from scratch.
Now, since we are already too close to 1.2, we should probably
develop this on a separate tree, to avoid breaking the build of
"mono/mcs", so it should be another top level module in the Mono
repository. And we should probably also kill "mcs/bmcs" (at least we
could retrieve the few patches that were done there).
Miguel.
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