Bootstrapping a prototype-based object-oriented language in 44 lines of code. | Hacker News Reader

Bootstrapping a prototype-based object-oriented language in 44 lines of code.

thingsaaronmade.com

14 pointsaarongough10 comments

Seeing OOP implemented in "raw" C is similarly eye opening. As with this example, you have to do a bit of caretaking, but even the most complex structures are built from simple ones that nearly all languages support.

Added: This isn't a particularly simple example, but I just found a good looking PDF on OOP in C that seems worth sharing: http://www.planetpdf.com/codecuts/pdfs/ooc.pdf

That was my thought when I saw it done too... The PDF I linked to at the bottom of the article shows a full implementation in C which is pretty awesome. If I remember correctly it's only a couple of hundred lines long.

At the moment I am in the process of writing a VM which provides basic functions tailor-made for implementing a language this way. Should be interesting to see how it turns out...

The send macro is a particularly clever bit of the C implementation. It uses GCC ({ }) compound statement-as-expression macros and static variables to insert an inline method cache at every place that you send a message to cache the result of lookup.

Feedback is warmly welcomed as always. If any of the HN crowd sees issues with this approach I would love to hear about them before I commit to building this into my final language...

I'd love to see an example of such a protoype based object oriented language in x86 Assembly language.

Haha, well it wouldn't be easy, but it is certainly possible.

A good tool to mess with something like that would be 'EaRing', the dynamic assembler by Zed Shaw: http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-21.html

Deleted comment

I have to admit some confusion. Where are you seeing the Hello World code?

oops, you're right. i got it mixed up with another "new language" post I saw today. deleting my comments...

I thought it might be something like that :-p

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