Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Small fixes - still hope for external support

In the last days I had some small time to look over the code. In short I want to explain the main change. In the past the CR compiler worked with a singleton CrRuntimeLibrary logic, meaning there cannot be two runtimes at the same time. Of course, this is the typical case, but as in (long) future, it would be nice to support a minimal runtime for some methods (I am thinking around mostly OpenCL) that give a separate output.

Also, this code is split in this way for ideological issues: it is easier to debug and maintain code without singletons. The bugs also show some small limitations how the code was handled in the past, and right now, the runtime can solve methods, giving a more clean case implementation.

There are bugs in TypeClosure logic (maybe I will explain when I have time what it means ;) ) but don't take the Git top code for now if you want working code!

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Development will stall for some time

I encourage you to take the CR sources and play with them and try to advance them. Anyway for the next months I will work very little to improve CR: I have little time and I'm split in between work, family and other time consuming issues.

What I've learn is a fairly deep how a CIL instructions work, and that is possible technically to move most of instructions (if not all) to a C++ implementation, but there will be always bugs and work-arounds and they require time which very few people want to invest (none!?).

Based on this, I can say that I will be glad to support people to write tools or help them fixing bugs, but I will not work for now at least to improve CR. Maybe when you have more time, please try to add a feature or to fix something. Some parts are partially implemented and they need just "moving code around" to support more cases: delegates, generics, virtual calls have at least some code to start. If they are fixed, basically it will work a good chunk of .Net 2.0 codes.

This is it for now, I really hope that some people will try to clone the repository and improve the code and later I will be really glad to improve the needed parts, elsewhere it looks for now a too small incentive to make it work.