[Vala] Fwd: Writing an interactive console for Vala

["Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <sergey elementaryos org>]

Hello everyone,

I've migrated to Vala from very high-level languages such as Python, so I
always felt it would be useful to have an interactive console for Vala for
quick prototyping and block-testing. More recently I'd stumbled upon
LightTable IDE and was mighty impressed, but also baffled by the fact that
it won't work for Vala because all its grand features only work with
interpreted/JITed languages. So now I'm looking to write an interactive
console for Vala :)

First off, I wonder whether this was attempted before, and what were the
results of those attempts.

Second, knowing valac's Vala->C->assembly compilation algorithm, I can't
help but wonder if I could adapt one of the existing C
interpreters/consoles to work with Vala via libvala or something along
those lines.
Layering the Vala-to-C translator atop an existing C interpreter would not
only save a lot of work but also give the resulting Vala interpreter the
same error checking and reporting behavior as valac has now, so at first
glance this avenue looks very promising. I'd love to hear any comments on
the feasibility of this approach, especially from people familiar with the
Vala-to-C translator.

If the above fails, writing a language frontend for some virtual machine
(LLVM, JVM, etc) is also an option. A full-blown LLVM language frontend is
probably beyond my skill at the moment, but might be a nice collaborative
project if there's interest in having such a thing.

If the initial prototypes looks promising I'll be able to start the real
work on this in September since I've already signed up for Google Summer of
Code with another project.

Thanks in advance,
--
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff