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

[P T Withington]

I think the question is whether to keep supporting swf8 the way it  
currently is (where it's code generator is mostly a duplicate of the  
new way) or to try to integrate it into the new way (which would mean  
re-modularizing the existing code generator).  I tend toward the  
former, as it is a least-effort, because I assume swf8 will eventually  
be phased out.  OTOH, if you think swf8 will have to be maintained for  
a long time, the latter approach would be less effort in the long run  
(although more up front).

On 2009-10-07, at 04:41, Max Carlson wrote:

> 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