Cesar Lopez Nataren's weblog

According to this interview Robert Fisk will be presenting his latest book The Great War for Civilisation : The Conquest of the Middle East at México next january. That's great news.

Matthew Cassell, host of Academic .NET radio, invited me to talk on his show, get the podcast.

I'm sure Matthew is interested on getting more Mono hackers on his show.

Evan Briones just sent me a screenshot showing his brand new JScript's add-in for MonoDevelop; check it out:

He offered the help at #mjs on the weekend and two days later he showed me that, yeah!

The last couple of days I've been hacking on the base class library access from JavaScript. The current results are better illustrated in a screenshot!

The patch is not finished but it's progressing nicely. Stay tuned.

Update: Our JScript's runtime hero Florian Gross fixed a limitation in our late binding code so now we can execute Gtk# (third party .NET libs in general) from JScript; screenshot updated as well.

Last night came back from Puebla, the mjs compiler talk went really well, people asked questions and gathered after the session. I've uploaded the slides , if you want to check them.

Next thursday, october 6 , I'll give a talk about Mono and show some applications built with it at the School of Sciences at my university . The UpComing.Org info. I'm still hacking on the multiple files compilation patch and have fixed some bugs on the way, it looks like there's just one missing feature, which is handling multiple declarations with a common identifier in the proper way.

Btw, if you live in Mexico city or you'll be in october around here, don't miss the events already scheduled for the Carlos Chavez and Nezahualcoyotl halls at CCU . The list is really big but includes: 6 suites for cello solo by Bach, Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra , Spanish National Orchestra , and many more.

I'll be at ENC 2005 , next week, talking about the mjs compiler.

ENC 2005 - International Conference
Technical Sessions
Carolino Building, BUAP
Centro Historico
Calle 4 Sur 104,
72000 Puebla, Puebla, Mexico

Thursday, Sept. 29
4:00-5:40 PM
Projection Room - Technologies for distributed systems
An ECMAScript compiler for the .NET framework

Conference Program .

How to get there.

See you there.

A long standing feature request for mjs had been the compilation of mutiple files, I'm really happy to announce that the support for it is advancing nicely, as images are worth a thousand words, take a look:

The files:

cesar@itaca:~/mono/mcs/jtests> cat f.js
G ();

function F ()
{
    print ("F called");
}

cesar@itaca:~/mono/mcs/jtests> cat h.js
F ();

function H ()
{
    print ("H called");
}

cesar@itaca:~/mono/mcs/jtests> cat tensquared.js
var tensquared = (function (x) { return x * x; }) (10);
print ("tensquared = ", tensquared);

cesar@itaca:~/mono/mcs/jtests> cat g.js
H ();

function G ()
{
    print ("G called");
}

The compilation action:

cesar@itaca:~/mono/mcs/jtests> mjs f.js h.js tensquared.js  g.js
Compilation succeeded

Last but not the least, execution:

cesar@itaca:~/mono/mcs/jtests> mono f.exe
G called
F called
tensquared = 100
H called

I had to refactor and add some logic for identifier/method resolution and code generation, the another good news is that this changes will help me a lot for fixing some identifier and method resolution problems that we currently have. I need to test it and adapt our test suite for using this new feature. I'm expecting that this will speed up our test suite's execution time.

It has been a very long time since my last post about the status of Mono's JScript.NET , lots of things have happened, in particular this summer Florian Gross joined me on this effort as part of his Google Summer Of Code work, he wrote a lot of missing runtime support in the Microsoft.JScript.dll assembly and also setup Mozilla's test library for mjs and Microsoft.JScript.dll daily testing, which is really helpful and gives us confidence of the coverage of the language and runtime support that we have achieved; we are currently passing 5053 out of 6478 compilable tests.

Other highlights are: the implementation of the use of undeclared variables both at compiler and runtime level, late binding runtime support which includes prototype chain lookup, anonymous functions, support for a couple of missing operators like delete, also we provide the __proto__ extension from Mozilla's JavaScript. We got better error reporting, the very much awaited full support for value and reference types is on board, optimizations in cases where a method lookup can be avoid.

All these new features can be found in the Mono 1.1.9 release at the downloads page, which contains the source code as well as packages. Also, you can build our assemblies from Mono's svn .

A couple of missing and important features are the implementation of the runtime support for eval and Function's constructor, and multiple-file compilation, but we are hacking on them, we'll have them as soon as possible . In particular, I remember some people from the Helma and OpenLaszlo projects were interested in JScript.NET support from Mono, I'd love getting feedback from you about features and special support that Mono's JScript.NET might be lacking that stop you from using it.

We are working towards being full Ecma-262 compliant but have some very cool plans for the future, which includes:

• E4X support.
• Continuations support.
• Access to Mono's class libraries.
• Implementation of a MonoDevelop add-in.
• Emit debugging info.
• Type annotations.

so, if you're interested in helping, don't miss the fun and join Florian and me on this, we have created #mjs at irc.gimp.net, come in to discuss about all this stuff.

Big thanks to my friends Gilorro and Geronimo for creating my hackergotchi.