I kind of left on a bad note, I guess. The intervening months have been, for lack of a less loaded word, completely insane. I've been on and off my medication, in and out of carefully monitored family care, and into a few other situations I'd rather not delve into. There's been a lot of bad decision-making, and the consequences of that are, to put it mildly, a bit overwhelming.
Fortunately, it's not all bad news. I've stayed out of the hospital, the wonderful folks over at Egosoft have seen fit to keep me employed and fed, and even with some serious clouds darkening the horizon, there's a touch of sunrise peeking through, waiting for its chance to break out into full blazing daylight.
Needless to say, I had a lot to ponder this year during Thanksgiving.
There's been some cool stuff going on at work, which I sadly can't get into yet; but there's definitely a lot of exciting things to look forward to on that front. Watch this space.
I've been asked by several people if and when I will be finishing the memory management article series; I intend to revisit that series in the near future, as soon as I can locate my notes and remember where the hell I was planning on going with the whole thing. So there's another reason to hang out and press F5 feverishly until my glorious bounty of words pours forth to the masses.
Last but very much not least, I've finally gotten a bit of a balanced schedule that lets me work on Epoch stuff again when I'm not busy with my primary job. A few good points from that:
- Prototype CUDA integration is now complete and scheduled for delivery in Release 8. This means you can write Epoch code which is then cross-compiled to CUDA, which the nVidia driver further compiles to bytecode that can run directly on supporting hardware. At the moment the cross-compiler is very limited and only supports primitive arithmetic operations, but deeper functionality is on its way.
- Up-to-the-minute development previews are now available courtesy of the Google Code hosting of our Mercurial repository. The code can be checked out and built locally to see where we're at in the development process on Release 8; you can also browse around and peek at the implementation of the language directly on the Google Code web site.
- Assuming the world does not implode, I'm planning on releasing R8 for general consumption sometime around January 2010.
- Great news for GDC attendees - there will be another preview package assembled for GDC '10; anyone who is interested, feel free to contact me and I'll be sure to get you a copy at the conference. The package will contain a snapshot of the current code, documentation from the website on the hows and whys of the language itself, and a special demo of the GPGPU capabilities of the Epoch platform. Don't miss it!
I fully intend to get back into the swing of things here journal-wise, and try and keep things up to date, especially where Epoch is concerned. If all else fails, though, you can see a live history of development progress in our changelog.
