Skip to content
Richard Brooksby edited this page May 18, 2013 · 5 revisions

MLWorks Roadmap

Booting MLWorks

This is the plan to get from here to a working MLWorks development setup. We have:

There's no license for the MLWorks 2.0, so it runs as the "Personal Edition", with various restrictions.

The plan looks like this:

  1. Hack the source tree until the runtime will build and run on Windows7 x86. See branch rts-rewind.

  2. Using the runtime from (1) and the batch.img from the MLWorks 2.0 binaries, compile enough of the MLWorks sources that we can make a new batch.img. That batch.img, together with the runtime from (1), is then a bootstrapping compiler built entirely from our sources. Done on 2013-05-17

  3. Get the runtime building and running on Linux x86 and MacOS x86. We are unsure whether a .mo file (an MLWorks object file) has any OS-specific dependencies. We can look into that. Certainly it doesn't have many such. So it is possible that .mo files created by the batch compiler from (2) will be loadable by a runtime running on any x86 platform. Try it!

    If it doesn't work: use the batch compiler in Windows to build a cross-compiler for Windows 7 x86 that will compile for Linux x86 and/or MacOS x86, and use that cross-compiler to build .mo files for those platforms.

  4. At that point we can make a batch compiler, built entirely from our sources, built using a compiler which itself was built from our sources, on a *nix platform. Such a thing is really important because without it interested third parties can't work on MLWorks. So once we get there I think we should make a binary release (possibly also including a TTY REPL).

If you'd like to help, start with a Development Setup.

Clone this wiki locally