I have been slowly but surely working on vmips.
Several nice bug-fix releases have been sent out since 1.0,
and the 1.0.x codebase is, more or less, stable. All current
development work is focused on what is currently thought of
as 1.1.
The test-suite I mentioned in my last diary entry is all but
operational, and now I am integrating a huge patch sent me
by a user. I don't like huge patches, because I like to
review things incrementally. But the patch sounds like a
really good idea, with potentially huge performance gains,
so I am still, slowly, working on integrating it.
I don't really want to write up a vmips coding style
guide, but I may have to. It's one of those things that
magically takes the place of real work, and unlike most of
those, it's not fun. (Not fun for me, anyways, because as
a linguist, I abhor prescriptivism.)
As an aside, I'm now less disenchanted with Tcl, now that
I've had to write a lot of Tcl code in order to
implement the test-suite automation mechanisms, which are
based on DejaGNU. You just have to sort of accept at the
start that some things are kind of weird about the syntax. I
am still interested to know how to access Tcl arrays from C
code, though. Must train harder.
I released WebNews 1.2.3, which has a very
small change. In addition, one of my users contributed a
Danish translation of WebNews. Several others have
approached me about features they'd like to add, but only my
translator has sent a patch. (You know who you are.
:-) Thanks!) There really is nothing like people
happily using your software and telling you about it.
My research codes have mostly metamorphosed into something
that my colleagues can successfully support on their own.
That's good, because I mostly don't have time to do it
myself. I note that the one thing that still creates
maintenance hassles for me personally is (surprise) a Bison
parser I wrote for vsimII, because apparently parsers are
hard. Sigh?