Tue, 07 Sep 2004
gcjx
News on the gcjx front: Dalibor pointed out that it couldn't build
kaffe, so I fixed a lot of bugs (and added an iconv input
converter). Now it all compiles; there seem to be some runtime
problems, but neither of us has looked into it yet.
I've got a big unfinished patch to add line numbers to the bytecode as well as trampolines when required. The latter is the last known remaining bytecode generation issue. (The story is, an inner class can reference a private member of its outer class, but in this case you need to generate a non-private accessor method.) I haven't had time to finish this up, and unfortunately at the moment gcc cvs head doesn't work well for C++.
I also made a branch to hold the multi-threading code. This doesn't work yet (Benjamin's libthread++ isn't quite ready for checkin), but the idea is there. In theory with libthread++ in place you could run multiple parses in parallel, and also multiple code generators. Semantic analysis is still single-threaded -- making this work will require quite a bit more surgery.
C++I heard a couple of nice C++ rumors on the gcc list recently (no links since gcc.gnu.org is down presently).
Answering an earlier question of mine, one rumor says that a
future standard may allow the use of explicit on
user-define conversion operators. If so, nice (though I don't really
give this rumor much credence).
Second, apparently there is a proposal from Bjarne to simplify
iterations -- call it the C++ answer to foreach:
for (auto i = collection.begin (); i != collection.end (); ++i) whatever;
posted at: 23:42 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry
Upgrade
Last night I finally upgraded my main machine to FC2. I'm pretty cautious, since I don't work in an office and so if I mess things up I could be pretty screwed. And, I've had some really bad upgrade experiences in the past -- in fact a long series of them dating back to when I was a sysadmin long ago. The funny thing this time is that my cautious approach is what took up all the time. For instance I tried to upgrade my lesser-used machine first, but it turns out that machine is tweaky.
This upgrade wasn't without other pains. x-chat forgot about my configuration information, so I had to re-enter it. Likewise, the Gnome panel once again forgot all my settings... this one was a real loss, since of course I had 10 launchers and 10 other applets all nicely configured, and I got to redo that last night. This sort of thing is super annoying, and on top of that the panel seems to have had some more random UI changes, so for instance now an auto-hide panel on the right side of the screen will center itself instead of letting me put it in the upper right where I always had it. I know, preferences are uncool, but I actually used this one. On top of that some of the launcher icons are resized funnily, making them appear blurry.
I suppose I should report this and all the other goofy things I found.
UI NoteI like the fact that everything has a tooltip these days. It can be helpful, especially with the new menus that just say "web browser" -- when what I really want to know is "does it launch mozilla?". Sometimes the tooltip will tell me, other times I've had to actually look at the launcher to figure this out.
That said, tooltips on menus are annoying in a way. They appear too quickly and they tend to blot out some of the context on the menu. Sometimes, like say when I'm configuring my panel, I'm actually searching through the menus for something. So I've learned to move my mouse constantly to avoid having the tooltip show up. To me this seems like a feature that is getting in the way, there must be a way to change it a little so it is still useful without requiring a workaround. Positioning the tooltip so that it doesn't obscure the menu (or its parent) might work.
posted at: 11:53 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry
