I’m going to have to agree with Buffalo on this one.
Since you wrote a lot of code using Lua, I have gotten interested. After I read that compiler book you suggested (just got it off Amazon a week or so ago), then I hope to jump into learning Lua. If Lua is all that you make it out to be, then it could be a very useful tool in the tool box. BTW, have you looked into Tcl? It seems like Tcl and Lua have a very similar “target audience”.
Personally, I don’t see what is so attractive about running on the JVM. There is already a major competitor to the JVM which might “win” at some point in time: CLR. I mean, the worlds largest software maker is strongly pushing the CLR. We all know that at some point in the future 95% of the computers “out there” will have the CLR running on it (especially if Silverlight takes off). There is even an open-source implementation of the CLR: Mono. Disclaimer: At work I have zero hosts running Windows, and at home, one of my 3 computers is Windows.
BTW, I think there are a couple of reasons Java folks refuse to let JNI code touch there VM:
“platform” dependency, meaning that you can’t just ship some *.jar files and call it good. In the end, I think this is really a problem about deployment.
Fear of the SEGV (and other non-Java’isms)!
Personally, I think you have done a nice job of splitting Gazelle into two pieces: The compiler generator and the interpreter. If you can keep the number of lines necessary to implement the interpreter to a minimum, and make those lines as portable as possible… perhaps even having multiple implementations (one in Java, one in C#, one in C), then you will “win” everyone over.
People don’t care what language their build tools are implemented in, they only care about the “bits” that need to be shipped.
P.S. I like the new look on the blog :-).
