A few news items to share with you. Last week, James Noble and Andrew Black were both at PLDI in Beijing, and gave a short Grace tutorial.
We had some interesting discussions with the participants, which included both teachers and language designers, and are encouraged by the growing interest in Grace
We also heard last week that the paper "Grace: the absence of (inessential) difficulty" that we had submitted to Onward! has been accepted. A copy of the submission is on the Gracelang web site. ( http://gracelang.org/documents/onward-draft2012.pdf ) Over the next month we will be revising the paper in line with the requests made by the referees, so if you have comments, suggestions, or hints on areas needing clarification, this would be an excellent time to send them to us.
Finally, a reminder that a prototype implementation of Grace, called minigrace, is available (start at http://gracelang.org/applications/minigrace/ ). The compiler is written in Grace, and is complete enough to compile itself, so although there is much work that still needs to be done, we are making progress. A few students and professors in Wellington, Pomona and Portland are spending their winters and summers writing Grace code.
If you just want to try out some simple scripts, minigrace will run in any javascript-enabled web browser: no download or installation is needed. Just point your browser at http://homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz/~mwh/minigrace/js/
Andrew
Hi all
Several Grace folks will be at ECOOP+PLDI in Beijing in this week.
In particular:
• Mon 11 June – Michael Homer will talk about Grace at STOP
• Wed 13 June – James Noble will give a PLDI tutorial on Grace
Andrew will be in Beijing for the PLDI half of the week, and James and Michael around for the whole week. If you’re interested in Grace, come to one of these talks, or we’d love to catch up with you some other time this week.
In other news, we have (slowly) released "minigrace", an early prototype
compiler for Grace, that handles most of the dynamically typed parts
of the language, and is getting better on types & generics. Minigrace
was built in Wellington by Michael Homer, with Tim Jones & Jan Larres
joining in this year.
minigrace is nowhere near production quality: but it does work - it is self-hosted
on C, on JavaScript (accessible on a web page), and (temporarily) to Java.
We have some projects starting to experiment with libraries and APIs,
and to get a feeling for the language as a whole.
details are here: http://gracelang.org/applications/minigrace/
if you're keen, there is yet another mailing list for details about the implementation
cheers
James
