1 Mar 2002 brg   » (Journeyer)

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?

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