More on jSuneido

When I wrote the jSuneido post a few days ago it was just a vague idea. But since then it's been buzzing around in my head and it seems more and more like something that should at least be investigated.

I think there are good "business" reasons for doing it, but I have to admit it's the technical challenge that excites me as much as anything!

Of course, the overwhelming temptation is to use this opportunity to "fix" parts of Suneido that in hindsight seem less than ideal. But if it's only the server part of Suneido, then it will have to stay compatible with the existing client, so that should stop me from getting too carried away!

I went through my library for Java books but they're all fairly out of date so Friday I ordered some new ones from Amazon and Chapters, including a couple on the JVM. I was out of town for the weekend but Sunday on the way home I stopped at the local bookstore and picked up a few more.

A lot of my questions revolve around how to "map" Suneido onto Java and the JVM. Luckily, Suneido is not as "dynamic" as some dynamic languages. For example, it doesn't allow adding/removing methods on classes on the fly as Ruby does. (This was a deliberate choice - Suneido's predecessor had this ability and I felt it led to more harm than good.)

Here are some highpoints:

• Suneido exception => Java exception
• Suneido class => Java class
• Suneido function => Java class with static method
• Suneido number => Java BigDecimal
• Suneido instance members => Java HashMap
• Suneido method call => custom method lookup (until Java invokedynamic is released)
  

Suneido has more argument passing options e.g. keyword parameters so this will have to be handled on top of the Java argument passing.

Suneido blocks (closures) will be one of the harder parts. The code itself can be private methods, but the challenge is to provide access to the local variables of the defining context.

I'm not sure how to implement calling Java code from Suneido code. But judging from Groovy, I assume it's do-able, presumably using Java reflection. For now, I'm not too worried about the reverse (calling Suneido code from Java).

I'm not sure whether I'll port my own regular expression code or use Java's. It depends on how compatible they are.

Another issue is how to "map" (port) my C++ code to Java. Things like reference variables and templates make this tricky in spots.

Sunday evening I installed Eclipse on my MacBook and started to get my feet wet. I have to say that starting a new project, and in Eclipse's "native" language, I had a much more positive experience than when I tried to use it for C++ recently. Of course, I fumbled around a bit as you would expect with an unfamiliar tool but overall it went pretty smoothly and I'm enjoying the Eclipse features.

I chose to start by implementing the Suneido data types. I've written about 200 lines of Java code (as reported by the Eclipse Metrics plugin) including jUnit tests. So far it's been a straightforward translation of the C++ code to Java.

Already the portability is nice, I was able to work in Mac OS X at home and then copy the project directly to Windows at work and continue working.

It's hard to say how big a project this is. Sometimes it doesn't seem too bad, other times it seems like a huge job. Time will tell I guess.