[Laszlo-dev] Plan for platform-independent .lzo's (LPP-7184)

[Max Carlson]

This sounds like a fine plan - and a great way to clean up the compiler 
and make it easier to support other runtimes in the future.  One 
comment: we'll need to support swf8 for a while because some of our 
biggest users require it.

P T Withington wrote:
> Currently our .lzo technology which allows you to write a compressed, 
> linkable library from a library of LZX, only works for the swf8 
> platform.  We'd like to make this technology work across all platforms.
> 
> Here's a rough sketch of how I plan to do this:
> 
> Make a new subclass of JavascriptGenerator, DHTMLGenerator, and move the 
> JS1-specific transforms into that subclass.  DHTMLGenerator will be 
> parallel to SWF9Generator, which is already a subclass of 
> JavascriptGenerator.  There may be some simplifications I can make 
> there, because some of the methods of SWF9Generator are just there to 
> undo JS1-specific transforms that shouldn't have been in the superclass 
> in the first place.
> 
> [If we wanted to continue to maintain swf8 as a platform, it would make 
> sense to make a new subclass of JavascriptGenerator, SWF8Generator, and 
> move only the byte-code generation from CodeGenerator to there, leaving 
> behind the duplicate platform-independent tranformations that are in 
> CodeGenerator.]
> 
> Once JavascriptGenerator is not longer making platform-specific 
> transformations, make another subclass, LZSGenerator, that generates the 
> script portion of .lzo's.  This will output to the 'lzs' platform, the 
> extended Javascript that our script compiler takes as an input.  It will 
> also handle the minimizing of internal variable names and the 
> compression of the output.
> 
> Comments and input welcome.

-- 
Regards,
Max Carlson
OpenLaszlo.org