[LLVMdev] RE: LLVM languages cooperation

[Chris Lattner]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Sébastien Pierre wrote:
> In this respect, it might be interesting to come up with guidelines (or
> maybe something more "formal") for back-end developers to write such
> cross-language communication runtime.

Sure, that sounds like a very worthwhile project, but also a hard one. :-)

> As LLVM seems to offer a language-independant type system, maybe it
> would be easy to reference and interact with values of types (like
> instance of classes) of a foreign language ?

Yes, this is certainly possible.  All that is required is a set of
guidelines that various llvm front-ends should work with.  The hard part
about this is that the guidelines will be necessarily language-specific,
and you have an N^2 interaction matrix among languages.

That said, I'm sure it's possible, and there is probably a substantial
amount of overlap.  For example, smalltalk, objc, and ruby all share a
related message dispatching style.  It would be nice if front-ends for
these languages could share objects transparently...

-Chris

-- 
http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/
http://www.nondot.org/~sabre/Projects/