nSuneido DLR Spike

After getting a C# version of the lexer working I decided to take a stab at the parser.  Suneido uses a hand-written recursive descent parser so it's pretty simple code to port.

I've been doing some reading on the dynamic language runtime (DLR) so before implementing the complete parser I decided I'd push a spike through to actual code generation.

This turned out to be remarkably easy. Rather than tie the parser directly to the DLR methods, I created a ParseOutput interface. For testing I wrote a simple AstNode class and a corresponding AstOutput. Once the parsing was working I added a DyExprOutput class that creates a DLR Expression tree, which you can then compile via Expression.Lambda (see the tests at the bottom of DyExprOutput).

source code at GitHub (the link is to this specific version, you can navigate to the latest)

This only handles very simple expressions - math on numeric integer literals. (It doesn't handle even as much as the partial parser does.) But to get that far in Java took me way more work.

I found one book on this - Pro DLR in .Net 4 - which has helped. There's also quite a lot of material on-line.

Another nice feature is that the DLR is just a library - it doesn't involve any .Net internals. And even better, it's open source on CodePlex. It's troubling that it hasn't been worked on since 2010, but since the "dynamic" keyword in C# uses the DLR, I assume it won't be going away.

So far, I'm still quite positive about C# and the possibility of nSuneido. My primary motivation is that cSuneido is falling behind jSuneido, but I'm really not keen on doing a lot of work on the C++ code. And even if I did, it wouldn't solve the garbage collection issues. And we can't switch to jSuneido for the client because of the current Windows specific GUI.