Info about ongoing work on Clean

[rinus plasmeijer]

Dear Clean users,

Nick asked:

>    - when the concurrency constructs would be supported,
>    - whether or not the unix implementations would ever be updated

Well, we have to give priority to things.
Currently we are among others working on:
- Porting the Clean Object I/O lib to windows '95/NT
- Developing a new programming environment based on the Object I/O lib.
- Design and implemention of a distributed version of the object I/O lib  
- Design and implementation of a tool to enable easy interfacing with C

Extending Clean with 
- multi-parameter type constructor classes
- dynamic types

The Clean system is partly written in Clean (programming environment / linker) but mostly in C. 
To make it easier to add new extensions as the ones mentioned above to Clean we have decided to recode a very large part of the Clean compiler (from parser upto type checker) in Clean. A large part of the new compiler is already running but
it will take some time before everything is done.

Some optimalisations in the code generation have been added (removing of higher order functions, re-use of user defined uniqueness types) as well as profiling options.

Of course, we want to support Clean on as many platforms as possible.
But the amount of work it takes has to be reasonable compared with the other 
interesting things we want to do.

Windows and Mac systems have proven to be stable while there is a large user community.
 
Linux and Sun have proven to be less stable.
To generate a new version of the compiler for Sun or Linux is easy.
However, history shows us that this is not the case for the I/O lib.
The problem we have encountered in the past with Linux and Sun is that in new releases of these operating systems the I/O toolkit used has always changed slightly such that some features of the 0.8 I/O lib suddenly did not work anymore.
Testing and debugging was always much more work then we expected,
in particular since we are ourselves are no regular users of these systems.

Therefore we have decided to focus on Windows and Mac.
We will update the Clean compiler on Linux/Elf and Sun/Solaris
but for the time being we will not put effort in updating the I/O lib.

Other news: next year we start a new 4 years project in collaboration with Hollandse Signaal (a the Dutch manufacturere of radar equipment) to apply and adapt the Clean system for safety critical systems.
It enables us to put more manpower in improving the Clean system.


Greetings,

Rinus Plasmeijer