[Cardinal-devel] How Can I Help?

[Mark Sparshatt]

mattsbishop at softhome.net wrote:

>I just read what I could about this project both in the cardinal-devel 
>archives and on ruby-talk. I am interested in helping in many 
>capacities, but I will need to get up to speed on both Cardinal and 
>Parrot.
>
>I know lexers well; parsers, code generation, and optimization only 
>poorly. I can write documentation and tests. At some point I intend to 
>write my own Lex and Yacc replacement(s). You seem fairly happy with 
>Ripper so I don't know if I can be of use there.
>
>  
>
Firstly, sorry for taking so long to respond to this.

The area which needs the most work is documentation. To say that it's 
minimal is an understatement.

Another area which needs work is testing different pieces of ruby code 
and making sure that they parse correctly. This can be done using the 
ruby backend and making sure that the code it generates is semantically 
equivelent to the input.

I've started working on code generation. I'm currently looking at 
creating a parrot version of ruby's class library.

The two methods which I've identified are to either
rewrite the class library in IMC.
compile ruby as a shared library and access it using parrots native call 
interface.

The second would be quicker but all the tests I've done so far have 
resulted in segfaults.

Any help which you can give will be greatly appreciated

Best Regards

Mark Sparshatt