Saturday, August 12, 2006

Shed Skin 0.0.14, 1600-line program

hi all (two readers :-))

it's been a while, but I've been hard at work improving Shedskin. I actually got paid for about a month, to support a certain 1600-line program. it compiles fine now, so that means it's a new record :-) I'm hoping very much to find another job like this, so if your boss might be interested in paying me to do a 'cheap' translation of some Python program to C++, please let me know. I don't need a lot of money to support myself :-)

okay, so what's new in this release:
- string formatting has been hugely improved, so most combinations of flags and types should give the same result as in Python now
-several new imports are supported now: getopt.getopt, cStringIO.StringIO, string.*, os.{getenv, getcwd}, and shedskin-specific (typed) versions of struct.{pack, unpack}: struct.{pack_ints, unpack_ints}, that may be useful.
-many, many bugfixes, resulting from debugging a 1600-line program :-)

interestingly, getopt.getopt is supported by taking a pure Python implementation (in this case, from the PyPy project) and compiling it to C++ :-) in the future, I think this technique can be used to support several other modules (possibly 're'), helping me locate bugs in Shedskin and improve the amount of supported libraries at the same time.