micklat

Sharing data without a "shared heap"

This is a proposal for a shared heap without additional GC barriers. It requires some
support from the compiler, in enforcing that only certain kinds of values can be shared
between threads.

* suppose that the nimrod compiler can distinguish between const and non-const pointers
  and refs. I think constness can be inferred and need not be declared in most places.

* Define a "rigid" value to be a heap-allocated type V s.t. every pointer reachable from V

micklat

type
  W = object
    x: float
  PW = ref W

converter toW(x: int): PW =
  new(result)
  result.x = float(x)

converter toW(x: float): PW = 

micklat

improve the automation of low-level C bindings

Desirable skills: Knowledge of C

Description: Nimrod's c2nim tool helps create nimrod bindings for C libraries. However, c2nim does not parse the whole C language, and is not currently supposed to import whole APIs into nimrod mechanically, but rather to serve as a starting point for manual definition of interfaces to C libraries. c2nim is particularly effective in dealing with C's preprocessor macros, but is not currently capable of parsing many C header files.

Make c2nim accept more C declarations than it currently does, and produce corresponding Nimrod declarations. This can be done either by directly filling-in the missing capabilities, or by interfacing it with a mature tool for parsing C code, such as LLVM's CLang or the GCC-XML tool. If one of these tools is used, then it is expected that it would not suffice by itself, but rather augment the current c2nim parser, since these tools have their own limitations. A possible implementation might

micklat

import python except expr

type
  # A non-borrowed (counted) reference. Avoid copying these around! Nimrod doesn't have
  # the equivalent of an assignment constructor (yet?), so any copy of PyRef must be counted (use dup for that).
  PyRef = object {.inheritable, byref.} 
    p: PPyObject
  PPyRef* = ref PyRef

  EPyException = object of E_Base

micklat

# A high-level wrapper for python 2.x (thus the name "py2.nim" rather than "py.nim")

# short-term TODO:
#
# * check whether the destructor gets called at all
# * support more of the API
#
# mid-range TODO:
# 
# * don't print exceptions, retrieve the exception information into nimrod