It's been well over a year since I embarked on the monumental project of self-hosting the Epoch language compiler. In all that time, there have been a whopping ZERO releases of the language or any of its accompanying tools/examples/etc.

I'd been taking some time off from Epoch for a number of reasons, but this week I found myself with the inevitable itch to work on it... mostly because I'm yet again frustrated up to my eyes with C++ and really want an alternative. Which is suitable, since that's pretty much why the language exists in the first place.

Things are starting out gently, with some updates and polish to the Era IDE. It's mostly minor conveniences and visual improvements, but slowly and surely Era is starting to look like a real development environment. You can even compile projects now, although support for building/testing individual code files is still missing - I intend to build a proper REPL-type thing at some point. Ha.

Anyways, the point is, even with a tremendous amount of progress since Release 14 (including self-hosting), there's been no publicly visible changes. If you care enough to sync the Google Code repository you can play with the bleeding-edge stuff, but to the best of my knowledge nobody does that.

So this really comes down to a fundamental tension between two halves of my personality.

On the one hand, I really like the idea of constantly pushing out updates - it sends a strong message that things are still being worked on, and encourages people to follow progress more closely. The downside is that this runs headlong into my perfectionism, and makes me really uncomfortable. I hate shipping stuff that I know is missing important functionality or has huge bugs in it.

So while I love the thought of "release often", I kind of hate the idea of "release notes have tons of known bugs listed."


I might just wind up sucking it up though, and shipping Release 15 soon. It's a huge landmark and I want to have it out there before an entire year goes by between the self-hosting success point and the first time anyone actually uses the damn compiler.