Friday, September 4, 2009

Build: Refresh

Well,

After two years in the project, I decided a few days ago to start a major overhaul of the compiler's build code. In these two years I learned the basic structure of NFA, DFA, recognizers vs. transducers, look-ahead determination, creating a state-machine which can figure out the look-ahead of the langauge at any given point; however, in all of this, the code has become quite cluttered and needs a major rewrite.

I often had to spend a good twenty minutes to find my bearings in code I had just written the day before.

To avoid creating inferior code, I decided that it was a good time to take what I learned and put it to use: create common abstractions on the DFA/NFA constructs observed within the language. This will allow not only cleaner code, but code which can be more readily adapted to new uses later down the line.

To track the progress of this refresh, I've posted a checklist to its associated CodePlex discussions page.