World: r3wp

It actually kicked me out earlier when I left it idle. But I was 
able to join back.

Working on joining. I saw you two for a second.

I've seen you for a second as well.

OK, trying with my notebook...

are you able to hear us at least?

It doesn't like me...

Trying again.

I keep getting knocked off. "Call initiation failed"

:(

I'll keep working at it on my notebook. Stand by.

I'm not seeing the hangout in G+.

forgot I had to click a link...

Henrik, the link above should be enough

https://plus.google.com/hangouts/extras/talk.google.com/topaz%2520and%2520red

we are having a great talk, if anyone is interested in joining. :-)

Meeting has ended (for now?). It was great.

Henrik, it was nice to see you. That was a very cool meeting. OK, 
I'm going to get a camera.

James, it was great talking to you, but the connection was sometimes 
poor, which was a shame.

i'll check back in a bit in case someone else is around. in any case, 
it was a great talk. i guess we can repeat this next month or so 
- my afternoon seems to be the best time. too bad Peter didn't get 
to meet everyone else. :)

yes, I think we should do this again.

Yes, that was perfect.

Yeah, was really cool to meet with Henrik and hear James.

After having this experience, I am really looking forward to what 
you and Gabriel create.

I meeting note would be nice to read, just like old demoscene party 
reviews :)

* "a meeting note"

Well, the topics ranged from "how to solve the world's economic problems" 
to does Carl write good notes. Personally I appreciated the down-to-earth 
explanations of what Doc and Gabriele are trying to do and how their 
two projects are linked.

Looks like I'll have to stay up until 3:30 in the morning next time 
:-)

Peter, you may try to convince the others to show up earlier instead. 
;)


Endo: it was very informal, so it's hard to write a written summary 
or anything like that... though, Hangouts with extra has a note thing, 
next time we can try to use that. In any case, if you have a preferred 
date / time for next month, we can try to be there.

Gabriele: one thing I don't know about langauges that compile to 
other languages (and there are many, I am not targeting this just 
to you), how do you debug then? Do you have any plans or thoughts 
about it? Maybe compile in "debug mode" where you somehow can discover 
what is going on? 


I was just looking at ocaml 2 json yesterday and some other things 
and didn't see anything relating to this question.

Using any language, I debug 99.9% of the times just putting in print 
statements at different points in the code. And then remove them 
again later, when things work. I like keeping code 'clean' and simple, 
so this approach works for me. And then there are debug tools in 
the language, that are used to produce the code, that translate code 
from one language to another.

Yes I do some variant of that too. Hm.. maybe I just viewed all this 
wrong so far.. I imagined that when something will go wrong I will 
be looking and hacking on generated javascript (I use it and console 
sometimes), but yes I should view it that I will be changing the 
topaz with print statements for example and viewing the output.


In this case .. is it planned so that topaz could be automatically 
compiled on http request (in dev mode at least)? so that you can 
just edit and reload, like with javascript (without manually compiling)?

Hm.. i know now why I was looking at it this way. Because when I 
make a error in javascript now, browser shows me some line of code 
where it happened and I use that to know where to start fixing. Basically 
I usually can fix it imediatelly based on that info. 


If source lang. would be giving me for example line comments with 
source topaz code (I know it's not 1to1 but still) so I could aprox 
locate the same code in topaz it would be helpfull in this case

or if functions/var names would have some resemblance of topaz ones 
where possible instead being some hashes or random (could be related_topa_name_random_stuff) 
it would also help

Geomol, interesting. I do the same. I have used a debugger 15+ years 
ago.

Only if you have real hard stuff, with multi threading, register 
stuff etc. the print statements are becoming to much work to do.

But normal stuff... no debugger needed.

Janko, there are two cases here:

1) debugging the interpreter itself

2) debugging your own code (for eg. a web app written in Topaz)


I think that (2) is what interests you - in that case, you use the 
interpreter during development, so it's just the same as debugging 
in REBOL (well, I hope to provide a few more tools, but even without 
debugging REBOL code is not that difficult most of the time). Think 
of compilation as an optimization step, that you do only for production 
deployment etc. and only for some parts of your code (the parts where 
performance is important).

(Currently, if you look at the JS source, you'll see that names are 
kept from Topaz, so it's easy to debug; I don't think i'll keep this 
in the end for various reasons, but at that point i'll probably write 
some tools for debugging the interpreter itself and any other compiled 
code)

Gabriele, have you tried using Topaz with some kind of app packager 
like PhoneGap?

Not yet, there's no point at this time. But, there's no reason why 
it could not work. It should also be not that difficult to get it 
to work with Appcelerator Titanium.

Oldes in Other languages group - "Hm.. i gave it a try and must say 
that Topaz is much more interesting." So, I would like to ask - is 
there any progress lately? Is Topaz already usable for real-life 
code? An what is an speed overhead in doing some app in Topaz in 
comparison to direct JS execution?

Progress: I added the action! datatype, and am preparing to write 
the "real" compiler. i was hoping to start that this week but it's 
starting to seem very unlikely. sleep is starting to seem unlikely 
this week. :)

Being usable: no.

Speed: currently, you can use the "Fake Topaz" dialect and map 100% 
to JS; the interpreter is of course much slower. When 1.0 is ready: 
i don't think there will be reasons to worry about performance.

What's going to be a usage scenario though? I will have to compile, 
in order to get reasonable performance? I mean - I develop in Topaz, 
but client gets clean JS?

Or is that like this? : When user hits the website, Topaz "libraries" 
are being downloaded (language, compiler, actual app). When you inspect 
the source of the website, you can see real Topaz code, not a JS. 
This code is being compiled by JS engine for further usage, so the 
first run is kind of slower, but then it runs fast = compiled?

Can you make a compiler/interpreter written in JS that can automatically 
handle script blocks that have the right language set?

Brian: yes. See e.g. http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#scripts

Cool. Nice capability to add to Topaz... :)

Brian: I did that in JR in 2007.

Petr: actually, you have the choice to do whichever you want. For 
a production web site precompiling the performance-critical parts 
is probably the best way.

note that in practice, you'll have a dialect that specifies the whole 
web application, and when you deploy it to production, you get html, 
css, js etc. generated. but, nobody forces you to use the dialect.