Anyway, even if at the end it takes more memory than the current source file, we should not forget that having persistant ASTs that you can freely annotate brings far more than compression, it opens *many* doors :) The annotations on the nodes would take memory too. Well, at least for the annotation one wants to be persistant. Even with compression, storing all the annotations one would want to have would take too much memory. Imagine that you want to stores additional comments and discussions (instead of "self flag:" everywhere), statistics like code coverage, about which class a variable had across different executions, type annotations for many different kind of type systems (and remember its annotations, not intrusive, no syntax change, pluggable)... That's why I want to have repositories for storing node annotations across network. Like this we would have a compressed AST format in the image (called Bonsai) and a mechanism for storing and sharing node annotations on repositories (project's name: Baobab)
Camille can you describe these projects in the Pharo topics on github We should find a guy to work on them.
Yes but you only talk about Baobab right? Because Pablo is already working on AST compression and Bonsai.
yes :)