"Fundamentals of New Computing" (FoNC) -- see: * http://piumarta.com/pepsi/- Ian Piumarta's experimental framework for dynamic languages. * http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc * http://vpri.org
A possible starting point for TUNES?
PARROT (2002-present) is a lower-level VM designed mainly for Perl and other dynamic languages (Ruby, Python, Lisp/Scheme, Smalltalk, etc.).
http://llvm.org/ - Low Level Virtual Machine
PyPy - Python written in Python (2003-present)
A few notes: * JIT compilation (as in Psyco - see http://psyco.sourceforge.net/doc.html under "How does it work?") * Support for lazy evaluation, logic programming, persistent objects * C, LLVM, and .NET CLI back-ends * Javascript & Prolog front-ends begun...
Ruby 2.0 - several implementation efforts underway: * jRuby (Sun Microsystems) - JVM-based, of course. Version 1.0, released June 2007, supports Ruby 1.8.5. * Rubinius (Evan Phoenix) * MRI (Matz's Reference Implementation) * Microsoft Ruby (John Lam) * Cardinal (Kevin Tew) - uses the Parrot VM
Pat Collison's CROMA Lisp - Said to be a cleaner, re-invented Lisp dialect. If it's ever released, we'd like to play with it.
Clojure
Squeak Smalltalk explores a lot of ideas related to Tunes.
Clean Slate Smalltalk (2003-2005)
Brian Rice says the project is dead, mainly due to poor performance.
Max (2002-2004, 2007) - a reflection framework for Common Lisp. It's clear the authors put a lot of thought into this, but it hasn't generate the interest they hoped for. The easiest way to find out what it's all about is to skim the documentation.
As of August 2007, Tril has resumed work on Max.
Retro (1998-2002) showed that driver writing and other "OS stuff" is relatively easy, but FORTH is inadequate for our purposes.
After 2002, work continued on RetroForth and its descendants. Perhaps most notable is Factor, which has more in common with Lisp than with Forth.