[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: book



Greg,

There are a few other books and resources that i have found useful.
The first is sadly out of print:

  Peter Lee, editor. topics in advantage language implementation. 
  MIT Press 1991.

The second is:

  Jones and Lin. Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic
  Memory Management.  Wiley.

which is a very nice comprehensive survey of gc.

The third is:

  Christian Queuinnec. Lisp In Small Pieces.  Cambridge University Press.

It has "500 pages, 11 chapters, 11 interpreters, and 2 compilers".  it
is a wealth of implementation tricks and insights.  I highly recommend
it.  It is simply phenomenal.

Another useful source is our three panels of experts video series (on
runtime, compile-time, and language design) that are available from
our website:

  www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dynlangs/wizards-panels.html

Greg and I are trying to edit this into a proceedings of sorts.  (Note
that my previous link to our website omitted the "projects/"
directory.)

As a less painful alternative to going back to school, I highly
recommend Craig Chambers' OOPSLA course on OO tricks.

To my mind, the biggest shortcoming, bookwise, is a compendium of
dynamic object-oriented tricks.  I have had momentary delusions of
turning my language, proto, and the real bread and butter parts of our
MIT seminar, Advanced Dynamic Object-Oriented Language Design and
Implementation, into a book.  The book would be a hands on exploration
of these tricks.  The idea is that by the next time the seminar is
taught (probably in the Fall 2002), all the concepts from lectures
would be written in proto, providing an intellectual and practical
springboard.  Perhaps at that point I would be ready to embark on such
an enterprise.

Jonathan Bachrach