Martin's Activity Log

Snow

Woke up really early this morning, looked out of my window and - guess what did I see - snow !

Boston

There are now just a few days until I'm flying to Boston for a week and I'm really excited about it - it has been more than a year since I've been there last time and I'm really looking forward to see all the other Ximian and Mono guys again :-)

The last couple of weeks, I've been really busy with generics and we're now making really good progress with it. I'm now done with this big rewrite and cleanup and currently working on nested generic types - and I'm getting more and more happy with it. This stuff definitely rocks !

Doing the Generics Dance

This week, I started a larger rewrite of the generics support in the Mono runtime. It'll remove a lot of complexity and also reduce memory usage.

Here's a short summary:

• I'm now trying to get rid of these managed MonoGenericInst, MonoInflatedMethod etc. classes.
• There's now a new unmanaged MonoGenericMethod type which is used for generic methods and "inflated" methods. Moved some data from the managed MonoInflatedMethod to the unmanaged MonoGenericMethod.
• We cannot inflate the methods in mono_reflection_bind_generic_parameters() ie. at the time its generic type is instantiated because at this time MCS hasn't defined the methods yet. However, I'm adding a new mono_reflection_generic_inst_initialize() interncall which'll be called the first time someone calls GetMethods(), GetFields() etc. on the type. Then we inflate all methods and fields and store them in special fields in the unmanged MonoGenericInst. This allows us to use something similar to ves_icall_Type_GetMethodsByName() to actually retrieve the methods. This has the big advantage that the methods are only inflated once.
• I'm not totally sure about this, but most likely, the MonoClass of a generic instance will be very minimal and not contain and information about parent, methods, fields etc. - similar to the one from a type parameter.

A new generics week

I'm finally making really good progress regarding generics. All the gen-* test cases are finally working again and ....

Well, I really wanted to write a longer report, but at this place, the phone rang; having dinner with friends and most likely we're going to the Irish Pub after that :-)

Superbowl Champions

Congratulation to the New England Patriot's for winning Superbowl XXXVIII.