Since you wrote a lot of code using Lua, I have gotten interested. After I read that compiler book you suggested (just got it off Amazon a week or so ago), then I hope to jump into learning Lua. If Lua is all that you make it out to be, then it could be a very useful tool in the tool box. BTW, have you looked into Tcl? It seems like Tcl and Lua have a very similar “target audience”.

Personally, I don’t see what is so attractive about running on the JVM. There is already a major competitor to the JVM which might “win” at some point in time: CLR. I mean, the worlds largest software maker is strongly pushing the CLR. We all know that at some point in the future 95% of the computers “out there” will have the CLR running on it (especially if Silverlight takes off). There is even an open-source implementation of the CLR: Mono. Disclaimer: At work I have zero hosts running Windows, and at home, one of my 3 computers is Windows.

BTW, I think there are a couple of reasons Java folks refuse to let JNI code touch there VM:

“platform” dependency, meaning that you can’t just ship some *.jar files and call it good. In the end, I think this is really a problem about deployment.

Fear of the SEGV (and other non-Java’isms)!

Personally, I think you have done a nice job of splitting Gazelle into two pieces: The compiler generator and the interpreter. If you can keep the number of lines necessary to implement the interpreter to a minimum, and make those lines as portable as possible… perhaps even having multiple implementations (one in Java, one in C#, one in C), then you will “win” everyone over.

People don’t care what language their build tools are implemented in, they only care about the “bits” that need to be shipped.

P.S. I like the new look on the blog .

But let my source code get uglier?? Never!!

I do wish I had a better strategy for the JVM though. There are just so many people and organizations that are totally bought into it, and won’t look twice at something that doesn’t run on it. How am I going to achieve world domination if I am not also dominating the JVM?

I fall into the pro-lua camp, and I have two arguments neither of which has much
to do with technology. Both have to do with social issues, and as Paul will
tell you I am absolute social political genius which everyone should desperately
try to emulate. Also, I am graduate student in a school involving
human-computer interaction, where we learn all sorts of secret interaction
techniques that I can’t tell you about. Woooooo!

1. Seems to me that there are very few good reasons to take a technology that
you know works and you actually really like and replace it with a technology
that may turn out to be neither of those things. Considering that the payoff
we’re looking for here is your personal enjoyment in a lot of ways, that’s a
risk.

Of course, if this gets really popular you might be remembered forever
just like L.R. Grammer, Ichabald Von Regex, or many other of those famous parser
guys we would have all learned about if we had been paying any attention in our
compliers class. And if you had somebody who had came to you and said “your
thing is really cool and I can think of 100 specific ways to use it tomorrow if only it
was javascript”, I think I’d be on the other side. But just your intuition that
people might not be willing to go for a non-curly-brace language – I’m not
convinced it will be a bigger win than adding cool sexy features (which will
feel better in the neat language you already like).

2. Speaking of cool sexy features, it seems maybe a bit earily to be rewriting
from scratch. Let this current path get some play first, figure out what
features you really need and what features you don’t, let the source code get a
little uglier. However much you think you know now, after some real
applications you’ll know more and you’ll have brilliant new ideas. Then you can
write a new even better parser thing from the ground up.

PS. I dig the Outspoken blog’s fancy new do!