[zamalek]

I suppose CAAS[1] doesn't make much sense outside of the .Net community :). The idea is that you very aggressively break down the compiler into the core constituent parts.

A less Microsoft-centric project would be Clang. Clang is quite accessible and despite that it's not as loosely coupled as Roslyn (e.g. I don't think you can refactor using it), you can still solve some real problems with it (such as autocomplete and static analysis).

Basically, CAAS is the front-end equivalent of LLVM. You turn the whole compiler into a very tidy API: following from that it should be significantly simpler to create something such as the interpreter that you are aiming for.

[1]: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2621132/microsoft-net/micro...

[sbinet]

ah, didn't know about CAAS. of course LLVM/CLang was also on our radar. we are still pondering on whether we should target LLVM bitcode so we could easily build upon LLVM toolchain (and cross-pollinate with other LLVM-based interpreters. e.g. seamlessly interoperate with IJulia and CLing interpreters, sharing code and values at runtime thru LLVM.) to me, the main issue with LLVM is that it's a real pain to develop against, I know this for a fact having worked a little bit with CLing, the CLang-based C++ interpreter (the edit-compile-test cycle is that of a set of large C++ libraries, gophers tend to be spoiled in that department)

tangential: actually, you can refactor with the CLang libraries: http://llvm.org/releases/3.7.0/tools/clang/docs/LibTooling.h... (well, to some extent)