From: tiggr at gerbil.org (Pieter Schoenmakers)
To: tom at gerbil.org
Subject: tesla
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 1998 14:49:44 +0200 (MEST)

Tesla is the new TOM compiler that is currently being developed.  Tesla
is written in TOM; the current primary goal is to make it self hosting.

Yesterday evening, Tesla successfully compiled the 24-game example
program as included in the TOM distribution, and the resulting program
also ran successfully.

Currently, a few things still need to be handled before Tesla can be
used to properly compile the TOM library units or Tesla itself.  These
things include messages to super and posing classes.  Other features yet
unimplemented, that are not needed to self-host the compiler, but are
needed to properly compile all of the language, include method pre- and
postconditions.

In its current state, tesla behaves as the combination of tomc and tomr
when both running with the `-1' flag, i.e. compile a single unit to be
dynamically resolved.  When compiling all source files of a unit, i.e.
generating all intermediate C files, tesla is more than 60% faster than
the combindation of tomc and tomr (14 versus 48 seconds when compiling
Tesla itself).

Tesla can be retrieved from http://www.gerbil.org/distrib/unstable/.
You will need both the tesla and mu unstable snapshots, plus the latest
stable TOM snapshot (19980601 or later).  (Note that the documentation
extractor, tm, will not compile with the unstable mu snapshot; it needs
the stable mu snapshot.)