Bay Six Software

[Brent]

Hello,

I am announcing today that ViviFire will no longer be an IDE. Instead, it will be a programming language.

The syntax will be BASIC-like -- mainly inspired by Liberty BASIC and Run BASIC. However, don't expect much compatibility with LB or RB.

Currently, I am in the planning phase. Nothing is certain, but I pretty much know what direction I want to go in.

ViviFire will provide multiple paradigms. I am hoping most, if not all of the following:

• Objects (OO)
• Generics
• Modules
• Traits
• Aspects (AO)
• Actors

But don't let the list above scare you. It is my intention that ViviFire will make using these techniques more natural than most languages out there.

ViviFire will be compiled to machine code and should be able to target multiple platforms. The language will be coded in C++. The IDE will most likely be coded in ViviFire. All of the code will be open-source.

I have no idea how long this will take. It could take many years to get to version 1.0. I've heard that Smalltalk took 7 years, but then those guys didn't have the tools we have today.

If you are interested, please let me know what you can do. I am seeking people willing to give their opinions on my designs, and eventually testers.

Thanks

[STPendl]

I am not much into C++, since I almost only use plain ANSI C (no COM).

Could help with testing.

[Alyce]

Have you looked at BaCon, Brent? If yes, thoughts?

http://www.basic-converter.org/

[Brent]

Alyce, I don't recall ever hearing of the project before you mentioned it. From my quick skimmings, it certainly looks interesting. However, it likely has the same issues that most such high-level converters can have.

• It relies on GCC, which comes with most *nix systems, but has to be downloaded and properly configured on Windows.
  
• The conversion is not always perfect, resulting in GCC errors.
  
• GCC is "notorious" for its bad error messages.
  
• Thus, the converter can require quite a bit of knowledge of the target language/compiler.

My plan for VF is to use the LLVM back-end which has its own low-level platform-independent intermediate representation (IR) instead of a high-level language like C or C++. The IR gets converted to machine code. The main advantage of doing it this way is that the steps can directly communicate and influence which steps will follow in order to best optimize the resulting machine code.

[RichardRussell]

[Alyce]