Countdown

Alright! After almost 8 months of more than full-time hacking the end is in sight. Everything is looking great. I'm hoping to finish the final three features of my soc-todo-list today, except for integrating a GC, which I hope to do tomorrow. The three features are: support for nested tuple assignments, e.g. a,(b,c) = expr (this may also occur inside for loops/list comprehensions), bootstrapping some useful builtins (enumerate, zip, min, max) and supporting untyped constructors that do not flow to any instance variable assignments, e.g. in return [], we may want this to become a list(str), because for example there is a return ['u'] in the same function.

The last thing I would like to do is compile a simple neural network simulator that I wrote a while ago, as the final test case before a 0.1 release. It will require writing C++ versions of some external calls (e.g. math.e, random.random).

In all it seems there are no hard problems left as far as my aims go. Of course I could easily work another few years on the problem, supporting more and more flexible code, extending many features (e.g. internally typed ternary tuples..), work on extreme scalability (by profiling/maintaining object contours) etc. etc. For now I only intend to perform several long-overdue cleanups over the following months, as well as (hopefully) adding programs written by other people to the unit test set and fixing any problems they may have (again, as far as my aims go.)

Hmm, I just realized I practically haven't had a single day off over the last 8 months.. Maybe it's time for that vacation now..

Getting Close

It took me some time to implement everything that was required by the Othello player. What is nice about it is that it pushes many things a bit further again, relative to the other larger test programs. No large features were required, or any major bugs uncovered, however, but I did have to fix many small problems ('the devil is in the details'). For example, constructs such as 'a = b = c', '[..for.. for..]' and '(1,2) in '[(1,2)]' were not yet well supported, and conversion of None to 0-pointers did not work well with parametric code. In the end, the resulting C++ player now plays about 25 times faster than the Python version. Pre-allocating some 'constant' lists will bring this to around 50.

As I see it, there are now only 5 relatively major features still to be implemented to reach all milestones for the SoC. These are: iterative splitting of user classes (this might work already), more aggressive merging of object contours containing (object contours with) only simple types, generating method templates (C++ function templates inside class templates), integration with a garbage collector and fixing a problem I discovered in the static preallocation code. I think these should not take me more than 10 days to implement. Other than these, there are still many minor issues of course. Maybe (hopefully) I can spend the last 10 days mopping up some minor problems that will need attention before being able to do a decent release.

Back On the Job

Okay, after a few short days taking off (alright, of writing other Python programs.. :P) and preparing for and meeting with my university advisor, I'm back on the job. Over the last few days, I tried to learn my girl Python, by showing her, step-by-step, how to write a not-too-bad Othello player in under 100 lines. I don't think she could write something like that herself now, but I had a lot of fun :-)

I guess the first thing I will do today is to try and get this Othello player to compile. Programs like this one are perfect test-cases for the compiler: they often require some minor feature additions, which is nice and gives a feeling of progress, and generally uncover a few minor bugs, which are easily traced for such small programs. It will also be a good finger exercise to get going again.. There is still quite some work to do.. !