I’ve been developing a Smalltalk variant for just the fun of it and I wonder what would be a fellow stackoverflowers choice when it comes to targeting a back-end. These were my current considerations:
.NET, JVM: These two VM’s are mainly for statically typed languages and I assume it would be quite hard to target such a dynamic language like smalltalk.
Python (as source code): Seems to be the simplest way. Also it would be better if I could emit Python bytecode but it’s not well documented as other VM’s AFAIK (Need to dig Python’s source code for details!).
Self made interpreter: Out of the question as it’s no fun 🙂
LLVM, NekoVM, Parrot are other options I’m checking out. What would be your take on this?
Don’t discount .NET or the JVM so quickly. Dynamic languages are being developed for both (e.g. Groovy, JRuby, Jython on the JVM; IronRuby, IronPython on .NET) and .NET is gaining the ‘DLR’ – Dynamic Language Runtime. (See Jim Hugunin’s blog for more details.)