on-demand compiling and dynamic loading

[Ken MacLeod]

Hi folks.  Here's a heads up on a little project I'm doing that maybe
people can give me tips to make sure I'm doing something truly outta
whack.

I'm developing a preprocessed-C runtime for writing C extensions for
scripting languages.  It's like SWIG "in reverse", SWIG is intended
for writing wrappers for existing C/C++ classes, Orchard/Mostly-C is
intended for writing new C code as an optimization for existing script
code.  For example, converting several Perl XML modules to Mostly-C
has resulted in a 10x-50x speed boost.  Since it is intended as an
"optmized script language", it has several scripting-language like
features including garbage collection, attribute accessors, and
dynamic method dispatch (like Objective-C, but using direct-dispatch
for most methods)

Each module is "fully dynamic" so there are no .h files and each .moc
(source) file can be compiled standalone [soon].

What I'd like to do is support on-demand compiling, like Python does
when it creates .pyc files, then dynamically load them using libltdl.

I don't see any showstoppers from reading the docs, but I haven't
actually tried it yet, so hopefully I'll have news soon.

Source for Orchard is available at
<http://casbah.org/~kmacleod/orchard/>.

  -- Ken