On 25 May 2018, at 17:30, Cl��ment Bera <bera.clement@gmail.com> wrote:

What about a preprocessor like the Java preprocessors ? The Truffle project relies heavily on that for high performance Java and it's quite nice. It's difficult to do that in Smalltalk right now.

I think if you want to do what are asking for you just need to write a bytecode compiler extension.

I did something similar in the past to have precomputed constants through AST manipulation at compilation time. You can find it here with examples: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~ClementBera/NeoCompiler. Once the code is loaded you need to recompile the examples (NeoCompilerExample withAllSubclassesDo: #compileAll.). With it you can write code such as:
[ Smalltalk vm class ] Cvalue    
And depending if the compiler allowsPrecompilation or not, the bytecode compiler generates:
Smalltalk vm class 
Or just a push literal with the precomputed value (the class VirtualMachine).

this is not what #asMethodConstant provides?

Esteban

In the end I decided not to use this, but you can use it and extend it to support more than just constants (any AST manipulation is possible).
Just checked it works in Pharo 6.

On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 4:26 PM, Stephan Eggermont <stephan@stack.nl> wrote:
Debiller 777 <ozovozovozo202@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Well, I've already asked about adding new literals to pharo or
Smalltalk in
> general, however this time I have a better idea:
> macros. Can they be added? Because if I understand correctly they may be
> the only way to do that.

Why do you think they would be a good idea? We have powerful
meta-programming facilities that are well understood and somewhat supported
by tooling. How do we get value out of macros?

Stephan






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