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My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and I have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. My brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.
  Syntax improvement FTW | 
Posted - 4/14/2009 5:17:46 PM | I'm sure some of you will be excited to know that I've finally gotten around to implementing infix operators in Epoch. Right now all I've got is basic arithmetic, but the framework should be very easy to extend to pretty much any operator imaginable.
In fact, the framework is specifically designed to allow the programmer to define his own new infix operators, including setting their precedence level. This should make Epoch quite a bit more expressive and succinct than it has been thus far - and I haven't even touched the syntax skinning concept yet.
I have a huge amount of stuff to get done for R7, and possibly won't get much free time to hack on it for a while; but here's the general list of what else is coming:
Full set of infix operators
- Unary operators
- Parenthetical expressions (for overriding precedences)
Improved support for literals in the cast operation
Removal of hardcoded strings in the VM code; using a keyword table instead
- Replace message allocator with a custom pooled allocator to avoid locking on the heap during new/delete
Fix some memory leak issues
- Correct nested response map issues
Improved error reporting, esp. during task validation
- Improved syntax for initializing structures
- Buffer entity (support for both stack and heap allocation)
Better VM-level error reporting
- Type aliases (i.e. typedefs)
- Map/reduce functions
- Futures
- Change task IDs to string variables so we can refer to tasks from code
Introduce a new TaskHandle type in the VM (currently we just use Integer)
Stop directly using size_t etc. and instead use descriptive typedefs
Improvements to exception safety
Correct some cases involving private vs. protected
Simplify type metadata lookups, e.g. TypeInfo::GetStorageSize()
- Perform a complete code review, for exception safety, documentation, code cleanliness, error handling robustness, and elimination of hardcoded strings/magic numbers
Expect R7 sometime around the heat death of the universe.
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| Woohoo! GDC stuff is done | |
Posted - 4/13/2009 1:00:44 AM | I've posted the last of my GDC 2009 coverage - finally!
Go check it out and enjoy it, or I will adopt a ghostly form and hang around in your linen closet to scare you every time you need new sheets.
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| GDC Shtuffs trickling in | |
Posted - 4/12/2009 12:27:14 PM | More GDC coverage posted - this one is about optimizations on in-order CPUs (i.e. on modern consoles). Lots of great stuff, don't miss it.
Yes, I specifically spent my Easter Sunday morning transcribing my barely-legible notes for your benefit. I expect free candy and possibly also your firstborn.
Also, during the lecture, a guy in the row behind me fell asleep and snored very loudly. It was hilarious. You had to be there.
Oh wait, you weren't there, which is why I'm writing this. Ha, ha!
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| GDC still isn't over! | |
Posted - 4/9/2009 11:11:48 PM | Eurgh. I've posted about half of my GDC coverage and the rest has just gotten continually shuffled onto the back burner... then perhaps off the stove... maybe into another room... and, once or twice, it was outright banished to another dimension.
So yeah, more coverage still to come, when my brain wakes up again. Unfortunately I'm in the middle of a bit of career turmoil (which I can't discuss), and I have family coming into town for the weekend.
Therefore, you will probably see coverage from me start trickling in the unholy hours of the morning. And then I will probably die.
But I will die happy, rested in the knowledge that all of you wonderful readers got to get a glimpse into the guts of GDC.
And now, I must exit with flair and aplomb, and go be melodramatic someplace else.
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| More juiciness | |
Posted - 4/5/2009 1:24:11 AM | I've posted several more bits of awesome to the GDC coverage, all from the AI summit. I finally finished day 1! Woohoo!
(By the way, Richard, I'm sorry for mocking your Day 1 Wall of Text. I did the same thing, just split across 7 different articles - 9 pages, or 3586 words. Eurgh.)
Upcoming coverage will include:
- AI Roundtables (all 3 days)
- AI Summit: Breaking the Cookie Cutter
- AI Summit: Toward Solving Pathfinding (this one has lots of great stuff)
- Game threading tutorial from Intel
- Lockless programming lecture
- Technical directors roundtable
- Optimization on in-order processors
- More stuff on CPU optimization
- A quick overview of CUDA and its role in Gamebryo
- Some sneak-peek stuff for the new Larrabee processor
- A great lecture on staying passionate about game development
That pretty much covers my week. There were exactly 4 sessions I missed this year: one poster session (these are done at the same time as lunch, in an open and densely crowded hall, and generally are very difficult to pay attention to), one session by AMD that looked like it would be fairly boring, a Friday-afternoon preview involving Mass Effect 2, and a lecture on multicore programming that turned into a completely derailed and useless rant on... you know, I don't even remember. I walked out on that lecture after about 15 minutes and went to throw frisbees around the expo floor.
That's slightly better than last year (I think), since I generally plan for one or two sessions to totally bomb and not be worth the effort. Laziness and lack of energy are probably factors (ok, ok, and alcohol consumption too) but I will pretend that I have done nothing amiss.
Anyways, I'm probably utterly incoherent and babbling like a complete fool, so I'm going to go do... something... else. Writing articles in my current frame of mind sounds unwise.
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| Mmmm, GDC coverage. | |
Posted - 4/4/2009 2:43:25 PM | Crunchy new coverage of the AI Summit at this year's GDC is now up - check out the coverage page for the goodness.
I'll be covering the AI summit in detail, as well as some exciting programming stuff from the multicore and optimization worlds. Stay tuned; I should hopefully get the bulk of the coverage posted today, with some followups and such tomorrow.
Of course, this means that in reality I will go play Halo for the rest of the day, completely forget about coverage, and slack off until sometime next week.
But stay tuned anyways. Coverage is coming.
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In locus hic, omnes res dementes sunt.
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