Alpha 2 Status Report

[Michael Pavone]

Since it's been a while since the initial release, I thought it would
be a good idea to give a status update.

The new parser is nearing completion. I haven't done any heavy testing
yet, but it supports just about all of the syntax features of the old
parser (but using the new syntax of course) with one or two
exceptions. I also have some code that can transform a subset of valid
parse trees into something the interpreter can run. I hope to have the
new parser fully working and integrated by the end of this week. The
syntactic sugar I've been planning on adding might have to wait until
alpha 3 though.

Tail call optimization is mostly done. I just need to add some code to
handle things like mutual recursion and non-recursive calls in tail
position.

I haven't worked on adding any widgets to the UI library yet, but I
don't expect that to take more than a week if I stick to those being
Syllable only for alpha 2.

A number of bugs have been fixed. I fixed a couple of memory leaks and
took some other steps to cut down on the memory usage of the
interpreter. I found and fixed what I hope is the last bug with line
comments in the old parser. The argument count checking bug that
seemingly everyone who gave Rhope a try ran into should be fixed now
as well.

I've made an experimental port of the language to the Nintendo DS, but
I'm not sure if I should "advertise" that as being part of the Alpha 2
release and provide a binary. Currently if you hook an interrupt with
a Rhope callback, the interpreter will eventually lock up. I'm not
sure if this is the result of a memory leak I haven't caught yet (the
DS only has 4MB of RAM so leaks can quickly become a problem), memory
fragmentation or some other bug. The current interpreter is also a bit
slow for the ~90MHz ARM9 on the DS.

That's all for now.

Mike Pavone