Martin's Activity Log

Hacking the holidays away

So it's now 4 am on the last day of the christmas holidays - well, at least if you include the weekend :-)

I spent almost all the time on the Debugger - mostly to "port" it to newer versions of Linux which are using NPTL. After reading its design paper, I was really impressed and anxious to get it working in the debugger. There are several improvements in the new 2.6.0 kernel which make life a lot easier from a debugger's point of view.

Martin - alone in Trier

So it's finally christmas morning and I'm starting to feel like I'm alone in the city. When I drove to the gas station to get something for breakfast, I realized that there are almost no other cars in the parking lot in front of the appartment - looks like most people went home over the holidays. There was nothing in TV last night and I didn't feel like sitting alone in a pub, so I went to bed really early and got up at about 7 am.

I'm finally done reinstalling my Laptop - now I'm also running Kernel 2.6.0 and the new glibc 2.3.3. I'm now really happy with it :-)

Originally, I wanted to hack on C# generics today, but then I realized that I'll need my XP box for this, but I'll spend the afternoon at my parent's house - so I'm now hacking on the debugger instead.

It's XD2 time for me

Tonight, I completely reinstalled my Laptop. Debian is really cool and nice, but hey - I didn't want to miss this super-kick-ass XD2 anymore. So I backed up all my data and started installing SuSE 9. It was pretty much straightforward except that you shouldn't be too impatient when downloading over the network, ie. better do a complete installation with everything than adding all what's missing later.

So basically the installation took the whole night. I have DSL and it constantly downloading at more than 90 kB/s (so it was very close to the maximum speed), but it needs to download a lot of stuff. At about 7 am, I was finally done with it and started installing XD2. I've no idea how long it took to download it (I installed everything) since I felt asleep very soon and woke up early in the afternoon.

Now I have a really cool new SuSE 9 with XD2 on my Laptop :-)

For the rest of the evening, I have two football games (NFL, of course) on video tape which I'll watch now. After that, I think I also have a few episodes of Enterprise ....

I'll visit my parents tomorrow, so I'm taking the rest of today and tomorrow off - but I'll work from the 25th till the 30th. Normally, this is the time where you're making vacations, but most likely I'll feel very boring - there's just nothing going on on these days. Nobody's here in Trier, most pubs are closed on the 25th and there's nothing on television.

MCS warning fixes

Today, I fixed a few really annoying bugs in MCS which were related to compiler warnings on higher warning levels. MCS is now correctly reporting warnings for unused variables and fields; previously, you got thousands of warning messages, but almost all of them were incorrect.

A new generic and debugging week

On saturday, I finally finished flow analysis in mcs so these bugs should now be gone once and forever. I felt a bit boring on sunday and tonight so I sat down and hacked on the debugger again.

This week is a generics week again - and there are still a lot of things to do. I'll come with a more detailed roadmap tomorrow. Most likely, I'll also hack on the debugger, do some API cleanups and remove unneeded complexity.

Tomorrow - finally - is also the premier of Lord of the Rings - Return of the King and I'm really happy that I got tickets back in September or even August before it became completely sold out.

Flow analysis in mcs

This day starts almost exactly like yesterday: I woke up, got breakfast and started hacking on flow analysis in mcs.

It's really difficult, but I think I finally got at least reachability right. That's the code which determines whether some statement/block is reachable or not etc. However, reachability is not only used to eliminate dead code. It's also neccessary to check whether a method always returns a value, for instance.

Released version 0.5 "Clemson" of the Mono Debugger

After a very long time, I did a new debugger release today. It's more or less a snapshot release and comes without the GUI.

http://primates.ximian.com/~martin/debugger/mono-debugger-0.5.tar.gz

There are also some experimental binaries available for SuSE 8.2:

http://primates.ximian.com/~martin/debugger/mono-debugger-0.5-1.i386.rpm
http://primates.ximian.com/~martin/debugger/mono-debugger-0.5-1.src.rpm

Update: If you're on Red Hat, you need to set the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL environment variable to 2.4.1 (export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1) before starting the debugger.

Back from my vacations

It's now exactly one week since I'm back from my vacations so I should start blogging again ....

To summarize what I've done in this week, well that's basically ... generics

There are several exciting news about generics:

• where clauses now allow constructs like class Test<T> { } class Foo<T> where T : Test<T> { }

• gmcs can now compile corlib and most of the other class libraries.

  This was the most difficult part and I needed to fix several bugs to get this working.