[e-lang] Happy Tenth Birthday, E

[Allen Short]

According to the license info on some of the E-on-Java source files, E's original open source release was on 20 July, 1998.  I want to say how much I appreciate the work done by Mark Miller and the many others who have contributed to E's development since then.  As per the quote on http://erights.org/, thank you for helping keep options open for better-designed software systems. As security concerns grow larger in the public and the need for concurrent and distributed systems becomes more apparent, E is becoming more relevant than ever.

That's why I'm announcing Ecru, a C runtime for E. I've extended Darius Bacon's previous ELib work in C and added a VM based on the Smallcaps instruction set. The bytecode compiler is implemented in E and so far I've implemented enough of the language to run it. 

I plan to use Ecru alongside Python until it's complete enough to write applications with on its own. I've written a Python bridge module that can run code in the Ecru VM and exchange objects with it. I've also written a parser for E and an expander to Kernel-E in Python and a primitive REPL based on them.  (Eventually, I hope to rewrite these in E as well, and reuse as much of the existing code for 'rune' as possible.) 

Ecru's project page on Launchpad is http://launchpad.net/ecru/ . A tarball is available here: http://code.launchpad.net/ecru/+download . I've only tested it on x86 Linux so far, but plan to support other platforms.

Hopefully Ecru will provide the raw material for making E attractive for more projects, especially ones that dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are currently being used for. I look forward to your feedback!