The Bag of Holding

It's a slow Friday afternoon so I figured I'd brain dump some things I've been playing with for Release 14 of Epoch.

As I've mentioned in the past, one of my proof-of-concept programs for R14 is a raytracer. This is for a few reasons:

Raytracing is just cool (and I have a nostalgic...

300x300 pixels in 480ms.


Just for fun, here's the source of the raytracer as it currently stands:

//
// Some working thought-space for the raytracer project for R14
//


type listnode<type T> : list<T> | nothing

structure list<type T> :
T value,
listnode<T> next



structure Point :
real x,
real y,
real z

//...

As threatened, I've been working on a raytracer implemented entirely in Epoch. The results so far are promising:



Render times are hovering around 1.8 seconds for a 300x300 pixel image. Considering that the image itself should be drawable in basically real-time, there's obviously a lot of room for...

So a few days ago I shipped Release 13 of the Epoch programming language.

Turns out, that was a bad idea.



R13 has some seriously aggressive features in it. There's support for native algebraic sum types, type aliases (both "weak" in the sense of C/C++ typedefs and "strong" in the...

So, yeah. I decided I didn't have any patience and went ahead and shipped R13.

Check it.



Templates! Type system enhancements! Bug fixes! It's got it all!

So now that templates are basically working, it's time to seriously start plotting the 13th release of the Epoch programming language.

I've hammered out a few basic cleanup and documentation tasks, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. My hunch is that at this point I'll probably...

The following Epoch program now compiles and executes:

//
// GENERICLIST.EPOCH
//
// Simple implementation of a singly linked list holding arbitrary data
//


type listnode<type T> : list<T> | nothing

structure list<type T> :
T value,
listnode<T> next


prepend<type T> : list<T> ref thelist, T...

So as threatened, I implemented generic types last weekend. Took about a solid afternoon to make it happen, so not bad at all.

In the process, I realized that there's just a ton of code in the Epoch compiler in particular that's... gross. So I took a few days and cleaned it up substantially. As a bonus, adding namespaces to the language should be...

So once again I've dug out and dusted off the code for Epoch. The last several days have been pretty productive; I finished off the implementation and testing of algebraic sum types, and now the following program compiles and passes all tests:

//
// LISTOFINTEGERS.EPOCH
//
// Simple...

One of the Master's pupils was a notorious hypochondriac.

Every day, the pupil would complain to the Master of some new ailment. At first, it was innocuous; a rash from harvesting herbs, or a scratch from chopping firewood, or maybe a bruise.

But as time wore on, the pupil's complaints became more serious. Eventually, he came to the Master and...