Or a roadmap of sorts. The basic idea is to maintain forward compatibility for the “external” aspects: the language and the components. At the same time, the internals of DWS will be subject to evolution, incremental Darwinian [1] evolution, rather than a straight break into some next-gen architecture.
The main goals:
- Strong typing: this is a long term goal of dropping “Eval : Variant” methods, and ultimately, the reliance on Variant. Variants will stay in the scripting language though, but may become optional (see below). Changes will be incremental, with new methods and classes popping into existence, some as temporary glue, and other bits of code will fade away. What this means is that you shouldn’t rely on the internals classes, their methods, or even their still being there down the road.
- Expression tree: this is an architectural goal of keeping the expression tree “understandable” and maintainable. Even though specialized classes may come to abound, higher level classes will be maintained to keep the expression tree easy to understand and maintain. This is to allow using the expression tree as a specialized DOM, facilitate debugging, refactoring, static analysis, etc.
- Custom primitive types: allow optional primitive types to be plugged into the compiler, I’m thinking primarily of Variant, date-time, vectors and matrices at this time. From a language point of view, this could also mean optionally allowing operator overloading.
- Generics/Templates: provide some mechanisms for genericity, at least on the Delphi side, so that you can f.i. have a “TList<T>” in the scripts, even if you may not be able to design a generic containers in script.
- Local JITter: introduce a framework to simplify JITting portions of a script. The initial aim would be for math computations involving floats, vectors & matrices into SSE instructions. Complete JITting isn’t on the radar at this point, and probably shouldn’t be. This is unlikely to happen until a 64bit Delphi compiler is out.
If you want to help on the DWS compiler & runtime side, at this point the most needed things are unit tests. Can’t have too much of them :).
Library, tools and utilities front:
DWS2 came with a rather vast set of companion libraries, tools and utilities, covering many things from HTML web page generation to auto-completion support functions. At this point I will not focus on those, but on the core aspects mentioned above.
There are however a few RTL-like sets of libraries still to be released, TStringList, TStringBuilder, TXxxxList, file access, etc. all these providing extra optional functionality for the scripts.
If some of you want to help on that front, or need some of the treasures from the old DWS2 chest, they can go ahead and bring the old code up to Unicode Delphi, things should be compatible for the most part on the DWS side apart from a few name changes.
Documentation:
A natural choice would be the google code wiki facility, but it’s very primitive to say the least. Another possibility is wikia, but I’ve no idea how easy it would be to export/backup a wikia wiki at this point, should wikia go the way of the Dodo. Another option would be a no-database, xcopy-installable, portable wiki like PmWiki. I’m still looking around, if you’ve suggestions.