Simple Meta Object Programming / Simple Matter Of Programming

SMOP is an alternative implementation of a C engine to run Perl 6. It is focused in getting the most pragmatic approach possible, but still focusing in being able to support all Perl 6 features. Its core resembles Perl 5 in some ways, and it differs from Parrot in many ways, including the fact that SMOP is not a Virtual Machine. SMOP is simply a runtime engine that happens to have a interpreter run loop.

Important topics on SMOP

• SMOP doesn't recurse in the C stack, and it doesn't actually define a mandatory paradigm (stack-based or register-based). SMOP has a Polymorphic Eval, that allows you to switch from one interpreter loop to another using Continuation Passing Style. See SMOP Stackless.
• SMOP doesn't define a object system in its own. The only thing it defines is the concept of SMOP Responder Interface, which then encapsulates whatever object system. This feature is fundamental to implement the SMOP Native Types.
• SMOP is intended to bootstrap itself from the low-level to the high-level. This is achieved by the fact that everything in SMOP is an Object. This way, even the low-level objects can be exposed to the high level runtime. See SMOP OO Bootstrap.
• SMOP won't implement a parser in its own, it will use KindaPerl6 parser or whatever parser gets ported to its runtime first.
• SMOP defines two [Domain Specific Language]s for low-level aid:
• SMOP sm0p Language: A small macro language that builds node for the Default SMOP Interpreter Implementation in C.
• SMOP s1p Language: (read "swamp") A language to help building the high-level built in types, but still translatable to C.
• In order to enable the bootstrap, the runtime have a set of SMOP Constant Identifiers that are available for the sub-language compilers to use.

Other matters

• The array and hash autovivification is discussed in SMOP Autovivification.

SMOP Development ROADMAP

In order to keep this simple, the ROADMAP will stay here and will be edited as needed.

SMOP Changelog

Usually, things from ROADMAP should come to here when its done.