I mentioned earlier that I'd wanted to get serialization done for R3 as well, but I'm not sure about that now. I think serialization is a big enough project that, combined with the disassembler I want to write, it should be a release all to itself. There's also the fact that the stack related changes need to be tested out by people besides me, as soon as possible, in order to make sure the implementation is completely robust.
So for the moment, my tentative roadmap for Epoch looks like thus:
- Release 3 - Stack based implementation, documentation and cleanup work
- Release 4 - Completion of serialization, and inclusion of a separate disassembler tool
- Release 5 - Implementation of tuples for multiple return values from functions, and first implementation of structures; first nontrivial Win32 app (Scribble)
That should keep me busy for at least another month [grin]
Once all that is taken care of, I'll have to do some serious thinking about what needs to be implemented in order to have a good package ready to demo by GDC '09. Of course the obvious elephant in the room is support for transparent parallel processing, which is one of the big reasons I'm implementing a language in the first place. Aside from that, though, I haven't done much scheming, so we'll have to see.
Another area that will need some major work is library functions for things like file I/O, basic mathematics functions, and whatnot. I'm still pondering how much of that to make first-class and how much should just be done by talking directly to the OS (using the DLL call support that's already in place).
One last thing to consider is the importance of code reuse, and a module system for promoting it. It'll take some tweaking to the system to get it to work across multiple files, but hopefully nothing too complex.
Anyways... the beer says I should be sleepy now, so don't fry your tulips before they hatch.
