Eventful 1.5 weeks lie behind us now. The most interesting part for me was the new bug tracking system- this was my first real-code encounter with Python.
One of the other interesting problems was how to deal with badly behaving single-user code. SCI games sometimes loop over the GetEvent() system call without explicitly waiting (they didn't have select() or anything like this). It's not unlike the "repeat until kepressed;" thing I used to do back in my Turbo Pascal days, and it sucks about as much. FreeSCI tries to trap it now by using the most obvious route- it keeps track of calls to functions which wait explicitly or retreive time values, and, if none of these was called after two subsequent GetEvent() calls, it executes a "penaly sleep" period. CPU usage in some sequences dropped from 1.25 to 0.22, so this appears to be a useful optimization.
Traffic in the IRC channel has increased significantly. It's fun, of course, but IRC can easily distract from doing real work (although this doesn't appear to be a problem for most developers yet).
Python
This appears to be pretty much the most convenient language
I've used so far. From what I've heard, its integration into
C appears to be pretty good, too, making it a good choice
for scripting languages. Of course, it still has a few
things I personally consider problems:
- Indentation rules. Changing control structures sometimes becomes a battle between me and EMACS' tabbing rules. Also, they doesn't help with automatically generated code (this may not be what Python was designed in mind with for, though).
- list comprehensions and static lambda expression evaluation are missing. I know, they're in Python 2.1, but that doesn't help much until the licensing issues have been resolved (alternatively, those could be counted as the problem).
Alpha
Rumors about Samsung ditching API are about- don't know what
to make of that yet... OTOH, Samsung has information about
the upcoming UP1500
board on their page, whereas I can't find anything about it
on API's page...
Anyway, if we disregard politics for a second and examine
the specs, this looks like just the board everybody and
their 400W power supply have been waiting for: Compared with
the UP1000, memory bandwith was doubled everywhere (more
than doubled in some places, IIRC), including AGP, and it
comes with SRM rather than AlphaBIOS by default. Seems to
require an EV68, though, so I'm left to drool...
But back to programming: For some reason, Compaq's ccc
appears to have problems if people pass more than 6
parameters into inline assembly blocks. This breaks the
current alpha blending code, of course... Any ideas?