www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/kawa/kawa-tour_22.html

search

	Buy GNU books!

Kawa: Compiling Scheme to Java

1.21 Current and Future Work

There is very preliminary threads support in Kawa. It provides an interface to Java threads that looks somewhat like delay, except that the delayed expression is evaluated in a new thread. (The model is similar to to the "futures" concept of MultiScheme J. S. Miller: MultiScheme: A Parallel Processing System based on MIT Scheme, PhD thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Aug. 1987. MIT-LCS//MIT/LCS/TR-402.)

but there is no implicit force, at least yet.) Recent re-implementation of core classes (such Environment and Translator) has been done to support threads with optionally separate top-level environments.

An interface to graphics primitives is needed, but no work has been done. Unfortunately, Java's Abstract Windowing Toolkit is commonly considered among the weaker parts of Java, and lacks important features, such as a decent multi-line text editor.

More sophisticated Scheme code rewriting, optimizations, and inlining should also be investigated after Kawa has been taught to know about types as discussed in 1.20 Classes, types, and declarations.

One important goal of Kawa is that it should support multiple languages. This includes an interface to plug in new parsers, pre-defined functions, data types, and output formatting. Of special interest is re-implementing some of the ideas and syntax from my earlier Q language. These include a line-oriented syntax with fewer parentheses, and high-level sequence and array operations (as in APL).

Also of interest is support for Emacs Lisp. This would require an extensive library to implement the Emacs data types (such as buffers and windows), in addition to the challenges of the Emacs Lisp language itself (it has different data types and name binding rules than Scheme), but may be a good way to build a next-generation Emacs.