Older blog entries for cadrian (starting at number 4)

Following some discussion in the SmallEiffel mailing list, and some discussion internal to the SmallEiffel team, I'm likely to build the SCOOP subsystem for SmallEiffel.

I already made some attempts in the past, and Philippe Ribet had some good ideas too. I'm now reading a thesis by Michael James Compton on the subject, which (as any research paper) helps a lot in tidying my own ideas up. I do not exactly agree with any he says, though. Expect some paper by me in the near future :o) I'm thinking of making the system a bit more complete than what OOSC describes, or Michael's paper.

Michael made a SmallEiffel-SCOOP executable from the -0.76 version. I will not use his code but start from what Philippe and I already wrote.

Thanks to Geoff Eldridge to remind me I have this diary! Sometimes I get lost by the too many things I do. Maybe I should buy an extra brain (er... maybe just _a_ brain)

To sum up 6 months of silence, I don't work for Schlumberger anymore. I do some internal work at Alplog, developping an intranet with some strange techniques involving the files being retrieved from a database, not from a local disk. Does anyone know of an Apache module which can do that? Currently we use servlets, but the drawback is, the files in the database can only be static, and we would like to add some JSP (PHP and so on) stuff too!

Scoop is currently dormant. We found some interesting results, like the fact that the current "once" construct may be used to create thread-local *AND* process-wide objects, thus closing a war which has flamed for too long. Consider:

my_object: MY_OBJECT is
    -- this object will be thread-local (if MY_OBJECT is
    -- not a separate class; otherwise, see below)
  once
    create Result
  end

 my_unique_object: separate MY_OBJECT is
    -- this object will be process-wide unique!
  once
    create Result
  end

Tonight I'm in holidays. I go to a "classe de neige", i.e. I go skiing with 30 10-year pupils and their teacher. I look forward having some fun!

During this time I'll let my brain home. ;o)

I'll be back online Saturday March 9th.

Wow. It's been some time.

Still working all my free time on scoop for smalleiffel, with Philippe. We're getting some results already, I hope we can present our work to Dominique in a few days.

Went to the cinema this afternoon, watched Tosca. Great work.

Since Tuesday I worked with Philippe on how SCOOP may be interpreted and implemented in SmallEiffel. There are a lot of pitfalls not readily apparent with this keyword, "separate". We hope to achieve something, though.

Yesterday I wrote the C support for basic threading and message passing; today (and the following days?) I'll deal with SmallEiffel.

Yesterday I installed GPG too, my mails should now all be signed.

Well, that is my first entry, let's sum up a bit.

First of all, I'm not an English native, so expect some mistakes. My apologies, once and for all.

I work for an IS company (ALPLOG, France). Currently my client is Schlumberger, Besançon, France. I stop working for this client at the end of October.

I'll be in holidays till November, 12. I expect to work on SMerge, maybe I'll have some further look at the Eiffel mode (I hacked it a bit today).

I don't know yet where I'll work after that. I hope I will still be able to work on SMerge.

Wednesday I will see Philippe Ribet, a friend of mine (we are from the same school). Philippe is currently working for the SmallEiffel team. I should see Dominique Colnet too.

Well, time to get back home. I have no work left here at Schlumberger, these days are pretty boring. Looking forward being Wednesday 16h00...