10.1.1 and the week in review

[crc]

I've released 10.1.1, which contains a fix to the osx-keys.retro and
corrects an error in one of the examples in the documentation. It also
includes the documentation in HTML format as well as plain text.

Quick links:

Download: http://s3.retroforth.org/download/10.x/10.1.1.tar.gz
Manual: http://s3.retroforth.org/handbook/10.1.1.html

Other than this, I've had a really busy week. A lot of nice stuff can
be found in the development snapshots/repository:

1) .NET support (a port of the java implementation to .NET, written in
C#; thanks to Simon Waite)

2) Internal cleanups and enhancements
2A) No more global string table
2B) Exposed 'listen' (allows replacing the interpreter loop)

3) New tools
3A) shrinkImage.toka (allows shrinking a saved image for deployment)
3B) retrospect.retro (Provides a 'dump' word, a disassembler, and a
working 'see' implementation)

I'm hoping to expand retrospect into a more complete debugging aid in
the future, but this should prove helpful for those extending the
compiler, or who want to study the compiled code.

4) Modules
4A) I've started to bring them back up to date
4B) Documentation is coming
4C) Now contains the start of an optimizing compiler extension

And finally, here's a few things I hope to find time to work on soon:

1) Clean up the console vm (C implementation); move some globals into
structs
2) Improve the .NET implementation (C#)
3) Revive the Java implementation (it needs a lot of help to become
actually usable...)
4) Migrate Toka to the homegrown build tool

-- crc

[sixforty]

On Fri, 5 Jun 2009 18:39:07 -0700 (PDT)
crc <charles....@gmail.com> wrote:
[ . . . ]

> And finally, here's a few things I hope to find time to work on soon:

[ . . . ]

> 4) Migrate Toka to the homegrown build tool

I've not been keeping up, and I'm not sure what's meant by this. Could you rephrase, perhaps?

--
sixforty <s...@sixforty.net>

[Charles Childers]

The build tool (see tools/build.c) is something I started working on to handle dependencies without the hassles of make. (The dependency handling in make has proven to be problematic due to different implementations on the various OSes Retro now supports). So far it seems to be working well.

Charles R. Childers

[Charles Childers]

Yesterday was another busy day:

The Java port has been updated, using the .NET port as a guide. It only works properly on Linux/BSD/OS X systems (due to the poor console apis in Java, I have to use stty to change the console input from line breaking to key breaking). This is now a console port, and finally supports loading and saving of images. It also supports the --endian flag to change the endian of the image. (Java is a big endian target; the default image is built for little endian machines). One major downside: this is the *slowest* port. Loading and saving images takes a while, and there are noticeable delays when running on my development box.

The .NET port has seen some more work and now supports loading and saving images. It does not support the --endian flag yet. I expect to rectify this soon.

The C implementations have a corrected implementation of the endian conversion code. This will be backported to the stable release for 10.1.2.

All implementations can now be built from the top level, and "make image" is no longer required before building any of them.

Toka is now built using our homegrown build tool.

-- crc