bamboozled - Introducing boojay

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[boo]

Introducing boojay

[ bamboo ] 20:21, Tuesday, 23 October 2007

Consider the following simple application for a moment:

import org.eclipse.swt
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets

display = Display()
shell = Shell(display)
shell.setText("Hello!")
shell.setSize(200, 200)
shell.open()

while not shell.isDisposed():
    if not display.readAndDispatch():
        display.sleep()
        
display.dispose()

A boo application using the SWT java GUI library. Thanks to IKVM that's not only possible but very simple as well.

So what's the news? Well, Friday morning I was chatting with Klaus and he said to me "if you get boo to emit java bytecodes I'll do all my stuff in boo". How's that for a challenge? :)

Thanks again to IKVM, ObjectWeb ASM and the extensible boo pipeline architecture after a weekend of relaxed hacking boojay was born.

UPDATE: Just in case it's not clear, the generated class files DO NOT require IKVM in any way and can be executed in any compliant JVM.

Comments

Very nice job, Rodrigo.
I would like to help with this when I get some time.

I was going to wait until next summer to get back to work on programming language stuff but this is very inspiring that you started work on this java backend.

--Doug Holton, October 25, 2007 11:34 AM

Nice work! I'm really excited about boojay. boo is my favorite language and Java my preferred platform. Any chance for a quick HOWTO wiki page somewhere? Will boojay export things like runtime-retained class annotations?

--dramage, October 27, 2007 10:37 PM

Super!

--Darius Damalakas, October 28, 2007 11:40 AM

This is very good news. I been waiting and hacking some thing like this. I know what i will be using next!

--treeform, November 15, 2007 10:08 PM

This will be very powerful. I'll use it.

The java runtime and enterprise apis are so mature and on so many platforms. While the JVM is not as sophisticated as the CLR, there's plenty of future left in it yet. It may end up like the x86: so ubiqitous that the value of it as a standard platform ensures it will never die. Rather, innovation will continue on both sides of the bytecode interface.

The new Dalkin VM that powers Googles Android mobile platform is an example of innovation below the bytecode standard (it cross-compiles JVM bytecode to completely new VM) that will keep Java relevant for a long time yet.

Everyone smart knows that Java the language is a horribly verbose old dinosaur, yet there has been a distinct lack of "wrist friendly" languages that are also strongly typed (exception: Scala).

The current movement (Groovy/JRuby) seems to be towards dynamically-typed "wrist friendliness". But they both seem to unsuitable for high-performance applications without falling back to Java.

People say thats just a matter of optimization, but a look at the Groovy code (MetaclassImpl.invokeMethod) that runs on *every* method invoke and property access, doesnt leave me hopeful that it will be ever be fast:

http://fisheye.codehaus.org/browse/~raw,r=9648/groovy/trunk/groovy/groovy-core/src/main/groovy/lang/MetaClassImpl.java

That leaves a big hole that Boo can fill.

Of course , every language needs good IDE support to succeed nowadays; for Boo->JVM, that probably means a good Eclipse plugin.

--Ben Hutchison, December 22, 2007 01:05 AM

Thats pretty cool. Have there been any updates to Boojay in the last year?

--Ed, June 27, 2008 09:23 AM